[Hiring] Senior Robotics Solutions Engineer @PackageX

Role Description

PackageX is extending its platform from perception into action. Our systems identify, classify and verify what is happening on a warehouse floor. We are now closing the loop, taking that output and driving the physical equipment that acts on it.

We are hiring a Senior Robotics Solutions Engineer to lead that work in the field. You are the person who walks into an enterprise distribution center, understands their automation cell in depth, designs the integration between their robotics and our platform, and then builds it.

This is a senior, customer facing engineering role. You will spend real time on customer floors alongside distribution directors, industrial engineers and IT leadership, trusted to represent PackageX technically without supervision. Between site visits, you build.

We are starting with palletizing and pallet sorting applications in high volume distribution, and expanding from there into case and tote auditing, pick and pack validation, and material handling equipment.

Contract Details

• Term: Three months
• Location: Remote, United States
• Reports to: Chief Technology & AI Officer

What you will own

• Field discovery:
  • Lead technical discovery onsite.
  • Establish the equipment and controls baseline for a cell: robot model, controller and firmware, I/O map, safety architecture, camera and sensor inventory, cycle times, throughput and physical envelope constraints.
  • A great deal of what you need will not be written down anywhere. You get it by knowing what to ask, and who to ask.
• Robot control and motion:
  • Design, build and commission control and motion logic for industrial palletizing and sortation cells.
  • Motion sequencing, pick and place, stacking and pallet pattern logic, singulation, and recovery from partial or failed cycles.
  • This includes taking ownership of systems already installed and running.
• Safety:
  • Own the functional safety story end to end.
  • Risk assessment, safeguarding, emergency stop and interlock integrity, safe speed and separation, and the documentation a customer engineering and EHS team will sign.
  • Nothing we ship moves a machine without this.
• The control interface layer:
  • Command and telemetry between PackageX and robot controllers, PLCs, fleet managers, conveyor and sortation control.
  • Expect ROS 2, vendor SDKs and controller APIs, HTTPS and REST, MQTT, OPC UA, and industrial fieldbus where it turns up.
• Vision to motion:
  • Turn classification and inspection output from our vision models into safe, correct and timely machine action.
  • Including what happens when the model is uncertain and what happens when it is simply wrong.
• Failure modes:
  • Dropped links, partial task completion, and reported state that disagrees with physical reality.
  • You design for the floor at 3am, not for the demo.
• The operator surface:
  • Enough front end capability to stand up the views that show robot driven work in progress and put exceptions in front of a human, without waiting on a designer.
• Handoff and enablement:
  • Documentation, test coverage and internal training, so the work you deliver becomes durable PackageX capability rather than a one off.

Qualifications

• Production experience programming and commissioning industrial robotic arms. Yaskawa Motoman, Fanuc, ABB, KUKA or Universal Robots. Coursework and hobby platforms do not count here.
• Fluency in robot motion: Kinematics, frames and tool center points, path planning, singularities, payload and reach limits, collision avoidance, and pattern logic for palletizing and depalletizing.
• You have used a teach pendant in anger, and you know exactly why a pendant program and a cell actual behaviour drift apart over years of production.
• Real functional safety knowledge: ISO 10218 and ISO TS 15066 where collaborative operation applies, risk assessment methodology, safety rated monitored stop, category and performance level reasoning, and safety PLCs.
• Controls integration experience: PLCs, industrial protocols, sensors, conveyors, sortation, and the electrical realities of a working cell.
• ROS or ROS 2 in production. Equally useful: you know when ROS is the wrong answer for an industrial cell, and you say so.
• Strong Python and C++ on the robot side.
• Production services in TypeScript, Node, Go or Python, and fluency with event driven integration: REST, gRPC, MQTT, WebSockets.
• Able to stand up a functional operator UI in React or similar without a designer holding your hand.
• Comfortable working next to computer vision systems. You do not need to train models. You do need to reason about latency, confidence thresholds, false positives, and what a vision system uncertainty means for a machine that is about to move.

Requirements

• You are genuinely good in a room. You can talk to a distribution director about throughput and cost, then walk twenty feet and talk to a maintenance technician about why the gripper drops every fortieth pallet.
• You interview well. You ask the question behind the question, you notice when an answer is a guess wearing the clothes of a fact, and you keep pulling until you have the real constraint.
• You have delivered onsite for enterprise customers and you understand what it costs them to have you on their floor. You work around their shift patterns, not the other way around.
• You write things down in a way that another engineer, and a customer executive, can act on.
• You can tell your own leadership that a scope is not achievable in the timeline. Early, with evidence, before it becomes a crisis.

The Product Lens

• You think about the second customer while building for the first. Which parts of this belong in the PackageX platform as reusable robotics capability, and which parts are honestly bespoke to one cell.
• You can hold a commercial constraint in your head while making a technical choice, and explain the trade to someone who is not an engineer.
• You have opinions about what we should not build.