The Role

Valstad is seeking a Robotics Software Engineer specializing in motion planning and manipulation to develop the algorithms and software infrastructure that connect manufacturing intent to reliable robot execution.

You will work on the complete planning pipeline, including coordinate transformations, kinematics, reachability, collision checking, constrained Cartesian motion, trajectory generation, external-axis optimization and execution on real industrial hardware.

This is not a role focused solely on calling existing planning libraries or producing simulation demonstrations. You will be expected to understand the mathematics and implementation details beneath the planning stack, diagnose difficult geometric and numerical problems, and validate solutions on large-scale physical robotic systems.

The ideal candidate combines strong robotics fundamentals with production software engineering and hands-on hardware experience. You should be comfortable moving between mathematical analysis, rust/C++ implementation, simulation, robot-controller integration and debugging on the factory floor.

What You Will Own
Motion and Process Planning

• Develop motion-planning systems for industrial manipulators performing welding, material handling, scanning, inspection and related manufacturing operations.
• Convert CAD-derived manufacturing paths into feasible robot trajectories.
• Generate constrained Cartesian paths while maintaining tool orientation, standoff, work angle, travel angle and process speed.
• Develop free-space motion planning between manufacturing operations.
• Implement collision detection, collision avoidance and continuous collision checking.
• Develop strategies for selecting among multiple inverse-kinematics solutions.
• Avoid singularities, wrist flips, joint limits and discontinuities along long process paths.
• Implement reachability analysis for robots, tools, fixtures and workpieces.
• Optimize robot placement, workpiece placement and external-axis positions.
• Coordinate motion across manipulators, linear rails, positioners and other external axes.
• Develop planning and segmentation strategies for paths that cannot be completed in a single configuration.
• Incorporate robot velocity, acceleration, jerk and controller limitations into trajectory generation.
• Improve plan quality, computation time, robustness and predictability.

Kinematics and Coordinate Frames

• Develop and maintain the software infrastructure for rigid-body transformations throughout Valstad's robotic systems.
• Define and enforce consistent conventions for world, robot base, rail, flange, tool, sensor, fixture, workpiece, CAD and process frames.
• Implement forward and inverse kinematics for industrial robots and compound kinematic systems.
• Work with homogeneous transformations, rotation matrices, quaternions, Euler-angle conventions and Lie-group representations.
• Develop Jacobian-based analysis for singularity detection, manipulability and local motion.
• Integrate tool, base, fixture, workpiece and sensor calibration results into the planning system.
• Diagnose transform-order, handedness, unit, axis-convention and calibration errors.
• Model the effects of calibration uncertainty and measurement error on robot execution.
• Support calibration of robots mounted on rails and other external axes.

Industrial Manipulation

• Develop planning strategies for picking, placing, aligning and constraining large steel components.
• Account for object geometry, payload, center of mass, gripper configuration and robot reach.
• Support coordinated manipulation using robots, cranes, fixtures and custom workholding.
• Develop approaches for correcting part-position and geometry variation before robotic execution.
• Incorporate force, torque, compliance and contact constraints where appropriate.
• Plan approach, engagement, process, retreat and recovery motions.
• Support planning for custom end effectors, welding torches, scanners and inspection tools.
• Develop safe and deterministic recovery strategies when nominal operations fail.

Sensor and Geometry Integration

• Transform measurements from laser scanners, cameras, touch sensing and other sensors into robot and workpiece coordinate systems.
• Integrate measured workpiece position and geometry into motion planning.
• Modify nominal CAD-derived paths based on observed part conditions.
• Support seam finding, path correction and adaptive execution.
• Develop geometry-processing tools for extracting manufacturing paths and constraints from CAD models.
• Partner with perception and calibration engineers to define interfaces between sensing and planning.
• Build tools for visualizing transformations, collision geometry, paths, joint states and planning failures.

Robot Execution and Hardware Integration

• Integrate planned trajectories with industrial robot controllers.
• Work with Fanuc and potentially other industrial robot platforms.
• Account for controller interpolation, blending, command buffering, speed limits and execution semantics.
• Support trajectory streaming, offline program generation and hybrid execution approaches.
• Develop robust handling for pause, resume, fault recovery, interruption and process restart.
• Validate that simulated trajectories match physical robot behavior.
• Diagnose differences between the robot model, controller model and physical system.
• Work directly with automation engineers and technicians during commissioning and production.
• Participate in factory-floor testing and debugging of robotic systems.

Simulation and Verification

• Build simulation environments that accurately represent robots, tools, fixtures, workpieces and external axes.
• Develop automated tests for planning scenarios and expected failure conditions.
• Create regression suites for reachability, collision avoidance, singularity handling and trajectory continuity.
• Develop pre-execution verification for robot programs and process paths.
• Support controller emulation, log replay and hardware-in-the-loop testing.
• Build tools for diagnosing why a planning problem succeeded, failed or produced a poor-quality trajectory.
• Compare predicted cycle times and robot behavior with physical execution.
• Ensure planning-system changes can be safely validated before release to production.

Software Engineering

• Design clean interfaces among CAD processing, process planning, geometric planning, trajectory generation, calibration, simulation and robot execution.
• Write maintainable, testable and well-documented modern rust/C++.
• Develop Python tools for experimentation, visualization and analysis where appropriate.
• Build unit, integration, simulation and hardware-in-the-loop tests.
• Profile and optimize computationally intensive planning algorithms.
• Develop logging and replay systems that make hardware failures reproducible.
• Participate in architecture reviews, code reviews and technical planning.
• Help establish engineering standards for safety-critical and production-facing robotics software.
• Contribute to hiring and mentoring additional robotics engineers as the team grows.

Initial Priorities
First 30 Days

• Learn Valstad's current robotic-cell architecture, planning stack and manufacturing workflows.
• Review existing kinematic models, frame conventions, calibration processes and robot interfaces.
• Run current planning and execution workflows in simulation and on hardware.
• Identify the most important sources of planning failure, manual intervention and execution uncertainty.
• Establish baseline measures for planning success rate, computation time, path quality and execution reliability.

First 90 Days

• Improve the reliability of planning for Valstad's highest-priority welding and manipulation operations.
• Establish consistent frame and transformation conventions across the robotics stack.
• Build or improve visualization and debugging tools for planning and calibration.
• Implement regression tests for representative production scenarios.
• Reduce manual adjustment required between CAD-derived paths and robot execution.
• Define a prioritized architecture roadmap for motion planning, simulation and robot execution.

First Six Months

• Demonstrate reliable generation and execution of long, constrained manufacturing paths.
• Improve planning across robots mounted on linear rails and other compound kinematic systems.
• Reduce failures caused by singularities, joint limits, IK discontinuities and collision constraints.
• Integrate measured workpiece position and geometry into the planning process.
• Establish automated pre-execution validation for production robot programs.
• Reduce dependence on manual robot programming and expert intervention.
• Support the introduction of additional robots, tools and manufacturing processes.|

Required Experience

• Five or more years of professional experience developing robotics software, motion-planning systems or manipulation algorithms.
• Strong modern rust/C++ software-development skills.
• Strong understanding of linear algebra, rigid-body transformations and three-dimensional geometry.
• Practical experience with forward and inverse kinematics.
• Experience developing or modifying motion-planning algorithms for robotic manipulators.
• Experience with collision detection, trajectory generation and constrained Cartesian motion.
• Experience working with coordinate frames and transformation trees in real robotic systems.
• Experience debugging software on physical robots.
• Experience with Linux development environments, CMake, Git and standard C++ tooling.
• Ability to reason about numerical stability, tolerances and geometric edge cases.
• Ability to communicate clearly with software, controls, mechanical, manufacturing and process engineers.
• Willingness to work on-site and spend substantial time with physical robotic systems.

Strongly Preferred

• Experience with industrial manipulators from Fanuc, ABB, KUKA, Yaskawa or similar manufacturers.
• Experience with robots mounted on linear rails, gantries or positioners.
• Experience with MoveIt 2, Tesseract, OMPL, TrajOpt, Descartes, Drake or related planning frameworks.
• Experience with Eigen or similar linear-algebra and geometry libraries.
• Experience with process-path planning for welding, cutting, grinding, painting, inspection or additive manufacturing.
• Experience maintaining continuous IK solutions along long Cartesian paths.
• Experience optimizing redundant robotic systems with external axes.
• Experience integrating laser scanners, cameras, force-torque sensors or other measurement systems.
• Experience with robot calibration, hand-eye calibration, TCP calibration or workpiece localization.
• Experience developing simulation, verification or hardware-in-the-loop systems.
• Experience with multithreaded, asynchronous or real-time-adjacent software.
• Experience shipping robotic systems into production or customer environments.

Additional Differentiators

• Graduate degree in robotics, computer science, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering or a related discipline.
• Experience implementing motion-planning algorithms rather than only configuring existing packages.
• Experience with sampling-based planning, trajectory optimization or optimization-based inverse kinematics.
• Experience with SE(3), Lie groups, screw theory or differential kinematics.
• Experience with multi-robot coordination.
• Experience with contact-rich manipulation, force control or compliant motion.
• Experience processing CAD or mesh geometry for robotic manufacturing.
• Experience with high-mix, low-volume industrial automation.
• Experience with robotic welding or large-scale steel fabrication.
• Contributions to open-source robotics projects.
• Experience building diagnostic tools used by technicians and production personnel.
• Experience transitioning robotics research into reliable production software.

Shipbuilding experience is not required. We care more about deep robotics fundamentals, strong software engineering and evidence that you can make complex robotic systems work reliably outside the laboratory.

What Success Looks Like

Success means that Valstad can reliably convert manufacturing intent and CAD geometry into safe, feasible and executable robot trajectories.

Coordinate-frame conventions are consistent and understandable. Calibration results flow correctly into plann