Robotics Integration/Controls Engineer (Full-Stack Capable)

Robotics Integration/Controls Engineer (Full-Stack Capable) at Lightspeed in Northbrook, IL, United States.

Role Summary

EMPLOYMENT RELATIONSHIP

This position is at-will, meaning either you or the Company may terminate employment at any time, with or without cause or notice.

Responsibilities

What you will work on

• Bring up and integrate robot arms and the surrounding control system; design and tune motion, tooling, sequencing, and safety logic
• Integrate sensors, actuators, and I/O; build the real-time control/telemetry layer — stream motion and sensor data, model job/device state as explicit state machines, expose a clean API contract for the application and operator console to consume
• Stand up and maintain a simulation environment that mirrors the physical cell, so work can proceed in parallel with hardware and demos never block on a single robot Integrate vision/perception where the task requires it
• Write the supporting software around the robotics and controls — services, scripts, and APIs — and coordinate with the application team against a shared control-plane contract

Requirements

• We expect a strong fit from either a robotics or a controls/automation background:
• Robotics or industrial controls experience - hands-on bring-up and integration of robot arms (cobots a plus) and/or automated cells, motion control, PLC/industrial automation, sensor and actuator integration, in a real, physical setting
• Real-time integration — comfortable with control loops, I/O, and streaming machine state; modeling device/job state and telemetry (WebSockets/SSE, pub/sub, fieldbus, or equivalent)
• Programming - Python and/or C++ for robotics and integration work; scripting comfort generally
• Enough full-stack ability to build the software around the hardware — APIs, services, a basic data layer (Node/TypeScript and Postgres in our stack, but we care more that you can work across it than that you've used our exact tools)
• Pragmatic, demo-driven, comfortable owning ambiguity in an early-stage build

Strongly preferred / differentiators

• ROS/ROS2-building and debugging real nodes, topics, and control loops
• Simulation frameworks — Isaac Sim, Gazebo, MuJoCo, or similar; experience standing up a sim that meaningfully mirrors real hardware
• AI/ML in robotics - learned policies, imitation/RL, or forward-looking approaches (e.g. VLA-style models)
• Vision/perception - object detection, pose estimation, hand-eye calibration SLAM or other spatial/localization work, especially on mobile platforms
• Functional safety - e-stop logic, safety-rated I/O, risk assessment for automated equipment

About the Company

ABOUT LIGHTSPEED

LightSpeed Build Technologies is revolutionizing the construction industry through AI-powered robotics. Our flagship systems—BRUTE for automated wall panel manufacturing and DEX for on-site collaborative construction—are addressing the global housing crisis by delivering unprecedented speed, precision, and affordability in homebuilding.

We're an early-stage venture, building an automated physical system driven by robotic arms, live sensing, and a real-time software layer that ties the hardware to a customer- facing application and operator dashboard. We're past the idea stage and moving fast toward a working demo.

We need an engineer who can own the seam between the hardware and the software bringing up robot arms and controls, wiring sensors, actuators, and telemetry into a real- time control plane, and writing the glue that lets the rest of the stack drive and observe the cell. We're open to candidates coming at this from either direction: a robotics integration engineer who has worked across the software stack, or a controls / automation engineer with strong real-time integration instincts ready to go deeper on robotics. This is not a front-end design role - visual polish lives with another hire.

Additional Information

LightSpeed Build Technologies is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse and inclusive workplace. We welcome candidates from all backgrounds and experiences.