Flyer One Ventures · 6 hours ago
Senior Path Planning Engineer (Spacer Robotics)
San Francisco, CA
Full-time
Hybrid
Senior Level
$140K/yr - $230K/yr
6+ years expFlyer One Ventures is seeking a Senior Path Planning Engineer to join the core team building Spacer's production level robot. This role involves designing, implementing, and optimizing navigation and path planning systems to enable reliable robot behavior in complex construction environments.
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Responsibilities
Own the path planning and navigation architecture from global mission planning to local obstacle avoidance
Define technical direction, architecture trade-offs, and long-term planning roadmap
Lead planning-related design reviews, root-cause analysis, and performance optimization
Design and implement global path planning algorithms
Develop local planners and trajectory optimization methods for real-time obstacle avoidance
Integrate obstacle detection, costmaps, and dynamic obstacle handling into planning pipelines
Balance planning quality, computational efficiency, and real-time performance constraints
Integrate and extend Nav2 or custom navigation frameworks for autonomous mobile robots
Develop behavior trees, state machines, or task planners for complex autonomy missions
Implement recovery behaviors and fault handling for robust operation in unstructured environments
Establish quantitative metrics for planning success rate, path quality, and safety margins
Incorporate robot kinematics, dynamics, and actuation constraints into planning algorithms
Work with differential drive, skid-steer, or articulated robot configurations
Ensure planned trajectories are kinematically feasible and dynamically safe
Collaborate with controls engineers to ensure smooth handoff between planning and execution
Architect and maintain planning components within a ROS2-based autonomy stack
Design node architectures, lifecycle management, diagnostics, and logging for planning systems
Optimize ROS2 performance for real-time constraints on embedded platforms
Manage message interfaces, action servers, QoS policies, and system observability
Select and justify appropriate compute platforms for planning workloads
Balance performance, power, thermal, cost, and reliability constraints
Optimize planning algorithms for CPU usage, memory, and real-time performance
Work with hardware teams on bring-up and system-level optimization
Qualification
Required
6+ years of experience in robotics path planning, motion planning, and navigation
Expert-level proficiency in C, C++, and Python for production robotics systems
Strong experience with ROS2 in real-world deployments
Proficiency with Git for version control and collaborative development
Working knowledge of Docker for reproducible builds, deployment, and CI pipelines
Deep experience with global path planning algorithms
Deep experience with local planning and trajectory optimization
Deep experience with costmap generation and obstacle representation
Deep experience with Nav2 or equivalent navigation frameworks
Strong understanding of robot kinematics and dynamics
Strong understanding of coordinate frames and transformations
Strong understanding of real-time and embedded system constraints
Strong understanding of optimization techniques and numerical methods
Proven track record of delivering planning systems on physical robots, not only in simulation
Experience leading planning architecture for a commercial robotics product
Ready to roll up the sleeves and join an early stage startup environment
Experience with industrial, construction or mobile robotics
Familiarity with behavior trees, hierarchical task planning, or mission planning frameworks
Experience with optimization libraries for trajectory optimization
Knowledge of functional safety, fault tolerance, and degraded planning modes
Experience working with unstructured or outdoor environments
Benefits
Competitive equity, depending on experience and role level.
The total compensation package may also include additional components/benefits depending on the specific role.
Company
Flyer One Ventures
International venture capital firm investing in early-stage startups, founded by CEE founders.
11-50 employees
Funding
Current Stage
Early StageLeadership Team
Elena Mazhuha
Partner
Victor Zakharchenko
Venture Partner
Recent News
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