View Details

About the role

Research Scientist / Engineer: Robot Control & Planning About the Role Holiday Robotics builds FRIDAY, a dexterous industrial humanoid designed for repetitive and physically demanding work. We develop the full stack in-house—from hardware and firmware to control, simulation, learning, perception, and operational software—because reliable manipulation depends on every layer working together. We are building a talent pool of researchers and engineers who can turn dynamics, optimization, and planning into safe, real-time robot behavior. You will develop algorithms for mobile manipulation and whole-body motion, validate them in Holiday Sim, and deploy them on FRIDAY under real actuator, sensing, payload, and latency constraints. Depending on your background, your work may center on contact-rich manipulation, bimanual coordination, model predictive control, motion planning, trajectory optimization, state estimation, navigation, or the integration of these capabilities into one reliable execution stack. Key Areas What You'll Do • Design and implement controllers and planners for dexterous manipulation, mobile-base navigation, and coordinated whole-body motion. • Build real-time trajectory optimization, predictive control, collision-avoidance, and re-planning pipelines that consume live perception and state estimates. • Model kinematics, dynamics, contacts, actuator limits, and communication delays; identify system parameters from robot data. • Create repeatable simulation and hardware experiments, define success metrics, and drive failures to root cause. • Deploy algorithms on FRIDAY and collaborate with hardware, firmware, perception, simulation, and learning teams to improve end-to-end reliability. Required Qualifications • BS, MS, or Ph.D. in Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience. • Strong foundation in rigid-body kinematics and dynamics, control theory, optimization, and numerical methods. • Hands-on experience implementing motion planning or control algorithms on manipulators, mobile robots, humanoids, quadrupeds, or autonomous systems. • Strong C++ and/or Python engineering skills and the ability to debug across algorithms, middleware, and hardware. • Ability to translate research ideas into measurable, real-time behavior on physical systems. Preferred Qualifications • Experience with MPC, MPPI, trajectory optimization, sampling-based planning, whole-body control, or impedance/admittance control. • Experience with contact-rich, multi-fingered, or bimanual manipulation. • Experience with ROS/ROS2, real-time Linux, physics simulators, and robot hardware bring-up. • Experience using reinforcement or imitation learning alongside model-based control. • Publications, open-source contributions, competition results, patents, or shipped robotic systems demonstrating exceptional work. What We Offer • Competitive compensation based on experience, level, and technical impact. • The tools, compute, robots, and equipment needed to do your best work. • The opportunity to build, test, and deploy directly on FRIDAY and the Holiday Robotics full stack. • Close collaboration with researchers and engineers across hardware, control, simulation, learning, perception, data, and operations. This is an evergreen talent-pool posting. We review profiles continuously, and the timing and level of a formal hiring process may depend on team priorities and available openings. If your work matches our direction, we would still like to hear from you.