Robotics Engineer

About the role

Ubundi is a South African venture studio building human‑centered AI. As a Robotics Engineer you will close the loop between the data‑driven models produced by our First Motive platform and the physical robots that execute them, turning learned policies into real‑world autonomous behaviour.

Key responsibilities

• Design and implement the “task brain” that orchestrates multi‑step robot behaviour, including sequencing, arbitration and recovery.
• Deploy VLA/VTLA policies to robots in real time, closing the perception‑to‑action loop on both simulated and real hardware.
• Bridge the model side (datasets, training pipelines) with the robot side (ROS2 platform) to create reliable, repeatable autonomous runs.
• Define task specification, launch procedures and evaluation metrics to enable scaling of autonomy across verticals.
• Debug timing, latency, safety and failure‑recovery issues at the model‑to‑actuation seam.

Required profile

• Strong experience with ROS2 and the ability to integrate into a production robot platform.
• Hands‑on knowledge of real‑time policy deployment and ML inference within a control loop.
• Proficiency in orchestration techniques such as behaviour trees, state machines, task planning and arbitration.
• Solid programming skills in Python and C++ where performance demands.
• Systems‑thinking mindset with an instinct for anticipating failure modes.

Required skills

• ROS2
• Python
• C++
• Real‑time policy deployment
• Machine‑learning inference on robots
• Behaviour trees
• State machines
• Task planning and arbitration

What we offer

• Ownership of a greenfield model‑to‑robot layer from inception to production.
• A flat, high‑trust engineering team with no micromanagement.
• Hybrid work based in Stellenbosch with studio access for hardware work.
• Opportunity to work at the frontier of Physical AI and autonomous robotics.