# Senior Robotics Engineer, Controls at Clera

Senior Robotics Engineer, Controls at Clera in San Francisco. On-site, full-time, paying $180k–$200k. Posted October 29, 2026.

- Company: Clera
- Location: San Francisco
- Workplace: On-site
- Job type: Full-time
- Pay: $180k–$200k
- Experience: 4+ years
- Posted: 2026-10-29
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/clera/fbe00494-45c8-458b-84cd-6dcbf0111779/application
- Source: https://jobmagic.ai/jobs/senior-robotics-engineer-controls-clera-7x3x26

## Requirements

- At least 4 years of robotics experience, including hands-on design and tuning of closed-loop controllers on physical motion hardware.
- Strong grounding in classical and state-space controls, including LQR and MPC, plus practical state estimation using Kalman-family or complementary filters.
- Experience with system identification, frequency-domain tuning, and structural resonance characterization.
- Modern C++ for real-time control, and Python or MATLAB/Simulink for modeling and analysis.
- Experience with servo drives, brushless motors, encoders, and IMUs, and an understanding of latency and jitter in real-time systems.
- Comfort working across mechanical, electrical, and software engineering, and validating controls on actual hardware.
- Experience with gimbals, precision pointing, moving platforms, or target tracking is useful.

## Description

### About the Role

Join a small defense technology team building autonomous directed-energy systems. As a senior individual contributor, you will own the precision motion controls stack, from system modeling and state estimation through real-time implementation and field validation.

### What You'll Do

- Architect and tune precision pointing and tracking control loops for closed-loop operation at hundreds of hertz.

- Integrate sensor inputs and actuator commands, using state estimation to fuse IMU, encoder, and vision feedback.

- Identify and model gimbal, mount, and actuator dynamics, then tune actuators and compensate for nonlinearities such as backlash, friction, and saturation.

- Characterize structural resonances and develop filtering and compensation approaches.

- Build simulation and hardware-in-the-loop infrastructure to validate controls and reduce the sim-to-real gap.

- Conduct field characterization, document control designs, and establish tuning standards.

### What We're Looking For

- At least 4 years of robotics experience, including hands-on design and tuning of closed-loop controllers on physical motion hardware.

- Strong grounding in classical and state-space controls, including LQR and MPC, plus practical state estimation using Kalman-family or complementary filters.

- Experience with system identification, frequency-domain tuning, and structural resonance characterization.

- Modern C++ for real-time control, and Python or MATLAB/Simulink for modeling and analysis.

- Experience with servo drives, brushless motors, encoders, and IMUs, and an understanding of latency and jitter in real-time systems.

- Comfort working across mechanical, electrical, and software engineering, and validating controls on actual hardware.

- Experience with gimbals, precision pointing, moving platforms, or target tracking is useful.

### Compensation & Benefits

Base salary: $180,000 to $200,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

### Location

On-site in San Francisco, California, with range days.