Member of Technical Staff (Robotics Navigation)

Location: Redmond, Washington, United States; 4 days per week in-office

Salary: USD $119,800–$234,700 per year across the U.S.; USD $160,200–$261,000 per year in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City metropolitan area.

Company

Microsoft Robotics within Microsoft’s Discovery and Quantum division develops AI, cloud-enabled, and robotics technologies for real-world deployment.

What you will do

• Design and adapt algorithms that translate mission objectives, spatial constraints, and robot state into safe, dynamically feasible trajectories.
• Integrate navigation and planning with localization, mapping, perception, control, simulation, and fleet operations systems.
• Build real-time planning systems that handle limited compute, noisy sensors, dynamic obstacles, intermittent connectivity, and changing environments.
• Develop costmaps, traversability models, route-planning logic, spatial constraints, and safety-aware decision policies.
• Use simulation, log replay, field testing, and automated regression suites to identify failure modes and improve navigation robustness.
• Analyze telemetry and planner traces while collaborating with perception, spatial AI, simulation, platform, and field test teams.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field plus 4+ years of technical engineering experience, or equivalent experience.
• Proficiency in C++ and Python, with experience writing performant, maintainable software for real-time or near-real-time robotics systems.
• Experience developing navigation, motion planning, path planning, behavior planning, or control algorithms for autonomous or embodied robotic systems.
• Familiarity with robotics middleware and autonomy frameworks such as ROS/ROS2, Nav2, MoveIt, Drake, or Autoware.
• Experience integrating navigation with localization, mapping, perception, simulation, and robot control interfaces.
• Ability to pass Microsoft Cloud Background Check and other applicable Microsoft, customer, or government security screening requirements.

Nice to have

• Master’s degree plus 6+ years of engineering experience, or bachelor’s degree plus 8+ years of experience.
• Experience with A*, D*, RRT/RRT*, lattice planning, trajectory optimization, model-predictive control, or learning-informed planning.
• Familiarity with learning-based navigation, imitation learning, or foundation models for planning and decision-making.
• Experience with simulation-based validation, scenario generation, autonomy benchmarking, or regression testing.
• Understanding of safety-aware autonomy, collision avoidance, failure recovery, fallback behaviors, and human-in-the-loop intervention.

Culture & Benefits

• Mission-driven work focused on enabling collaboration between people, robots, and AI agents.
• Collaboration across robotics, AI, simulation, platform, and field deployment teams.
• Opportunity to work across classical robotics, modern AI systems, simulation, and real-world deployment.
• Benefits and other compensation may be available depending on role eligibility.
• Inclusive culture centered on respect, integrity, accountability, collaboration, and a growth mindset.