Robotics Engineer - Whole-Body Control

Your Mission

UMA builds general-purpose humanoid robots. Founded in Paris in 2025 by people from Tesla Optimus, Google DeepMind and LeRobot. We're early, building the humanoid and the control stack that runs it from the ground up.

We're hiring an engineer to own the whole-body controller and state estimation that keep our humanoid balanced and coordinated on real hardware, working alongside the team building our locomotion learning.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design and tune the whole-body controller for locomotion and loco-manipulation

• Build state estimation on the real robot: floating-base estimation, contact detection, sensor fusion

• Formulate and solve real-time optimal control problems (QP inverse dynamics, MPC)

• Characterize actuator behavior and design controllers within real hardware limits

• Combine model-based control with learned policies at the model/learning seam

• Bring controllers from simulation onto the robot and into pilots

• Build logging and diagnostics tooling for whole-team debugging

What You Bring to the Table

• Expertise in whole-body control on real hardware (QP inverse dynamics, MPC, task-space or hierarchical control)

• Strong state estimation background (floating-base, contact detection, sensor fusion)

• Proficiency in C++ and real-time systems (PREEMPT_RT, RTOS)

• Rigid-body dynamics and numerical optimization (Pinocchio, Crocoddyl, OCS2, TSID, or equivalent)

• Experience bringing up a legged or humanoid robot

• Fluency in MuJoCo or Isaac

• Bonus:

  • Loco-manipulation and contact-rich manipulation

  • Force / impedance control

  • Combining model-based control with RL policies

  • Safety standards for robots operating near people

• UMA is an inclusive workplace that values exceptional builders over perfect pedigrees. Whatever your background, identity, or journey, if you don't meet every criterion but believe you can have an outsized impact here, we strongly encourage you to apply.