Technical Staff, Robotics (Navigation)

Job Description

Job Title: Member of Technical Staff, Microsoft Robotics (Navigation). Location: Redmond, Washington, United States

Job Type:

• Full-time
• 4 days per week in office
• Travel: Less than 25%

Responsibilities:

• Develop and adapt algorithms that translate mission objectives, task assignments, spatial constraints, and robot states into safe, dynamically feasible trajectories for mobile robots, manipulators, and multi-robot systems.
• Integrate navigation and planning modules with localization, mapping, perception, control, simulation, and fleet operations systems;
• Build and improve real-time planning systems that operate with limited computing resources, noisy sensors, dynamic obstacles, intermittent connectivity, and changing environments.
• Develop costmaps, traversability models, spatial constraints, route-planning logic, and safety-aware decision policies for robots operating in human-populated and complex environments.
• Use simulation, log replay, field testing, and automated regression suites to evaluate navigation performance, identify failure modes, and improve system robustness.
• Collaborate with perception, spatial AI, simulation, platform, and field test teams to validate navigation behavior across real and simulated environments.
• Analyze robot telemetry, navigation logs, planner traces, and field test results to debug autonomy issues and tune planning parameters.
• Drive measurable improvements in success rate, safety, latency, and mission efficiency;
• Write production-quality software in Python, C++, or equivalent languages, following best practices for testing, maintainability, observability, and operational readiness.
• Stay current with robotics navigation, motion planning, model-predictive control, multi-agent planning, robotics foundation models, and embodied AI.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field plus 4+ years of technical engineering experience with coding in C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, or similar languages, or equivalent experience.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and government security screening requirements.
• Must pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire or transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred:

• Master's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field plus 6+ years of technical engineering experience, or bachelor's degree plus 8+ years of experience, or equivalent experience.
• Experience developing navigation, motion planning, path planning, behavior planning, or control algorithms for autonomous robots, manipulators, drones, autonomous vehicles, or other robotic systems.
• Familiarity with robotics middleware and autonomy frameworks such as ROS/ROS2, Nav2, MoveIt, Drake, Autoware, or equivalent stacks.
• Experience with A*, D*, RRT/RRT*, lattice planning, trajectory optimization, model-predictive control, or learning-informed planning;
• Experience integrating navigation systems with localization, mapping, perception, simulation, and robot control interfaces.
• Familiarity with learning-based navigation, imitation learning, or foundation models applied to planning and decision-making.
• Proficiency in C++ and Python for performant, maintainable real-time or near-real-time robotics software.
• Experience debugging autonomy behavior using logs, telemetry, visualization tools, simulation replay, and field test data.
• Familiarity with navigation challenges in dynamic, human-populated, degraded, unstructured, or partially observable environments.
• Experience with simulation-based validation, scenario generation, autonomy benchmarking, or regression testing.
• Understanding of safety-aware autonomy, including collision avoidance, operational design domains, failure recovery, fallback behaviors, and human-in-the-loop intervention.

Benefits and Compensation:

• Typical U.S. base pay range: $119,800 to $234,700 per year.
• San Francisco Bay Area and New York City metropolitan area range: $160,200 to $261,000 per year.
• Certain roles may be eligible for additional benefits and compensation;
• Benefits and additional pay information are available through Microsoft's careers compensation resources.