Robotics/Hardware Engineer, Simulation

Engineer| San Francisco, CA | ONSITE | Full-time | $150k–200k + equity | https://lumenresearch.co

Howdy! Lumen Labs is building the cognitive layer for physical AI. Nearly every major robotics effort today teaches machines by showing them thousands of hours of human teleoperation. We think that paradigm has a ceiling, and we’re working on nature-inspired architectures for unstructured environments (construction sites, mining, pipelines, battlefield). Pre-seed, backed by top VC funds and operators from robotics/AI companies. Today we run wheeled navigation, we’re dipping our toes into drones, and we’re eyeing weirder platforms like home inspection.
We’re a small team hiring two engineers who will work closely with each other and with our model engineer:
ROBOTICS / HARDWARE ENGINEER: Own the hardware and infrastructure that keeps our research platforms running: the ROS2 (Humble) stack across onboard and offboard compute, sensor integration and calibration (LiDAR, depth, IMU, encoders), the safety pipeline during autonomous runs, and getting trained policies onto real hardware. Will be hands-on with real mobile robots (UART, encoders, PWM, IMU, LiDAR), strong Python + embedded, comfortable reading code you didn’t write, and can debug hardware and firmware at the same time. Full posting: https://desert-bearskin-26d.notion.site/Robotics-Engineer-Robot-Wrangler-Lumen-Labs-3d8e2e6bfecb80b6ba9ede7b09b31a4c
SIMULATION ENGINEER: Own “the gauntlet,” our test library for putting new architectures through their paces: a Gymnasium-style interface on both sides (environment and model) so anything built to spec is compatible with everything else. Mostly MuJoCo and Gazebo today, moving toward Isaac Sim, and some other more bespoke sims. You will be building task simulators for training and testing and keeping them running (GPS-denied drone nav, construction sites, boat cleaning, forklifts, abstract control), including physics, honest sensor models, digital twins of our real platforms, domain randomization, and the sim compute. Dungeon Master. If you have built or substantially rebuilt a simulator of some kind (robotics/RL is closest, but a physics-based game, scientific sim, or flight sim mod counts) this would be a good role for you. Comfortable with the Gymnasium/dm_control way of thinking, can pick up GPU-vectorized sim (MJX, Isaac Lab, JAX) quickly, and test-driven. Full posting: https://desert-bearskin-26d.notion.site/Simulation-Engineer-Worldsmith-3f4e2e6bfecb805fbe1ec448140c6e6e
Email [email protected], mention HN and which role, and tell us about a project you’ve built. If you can link to a trained policy running on real hardware (robotics) or a simulator you built or fixed and something you trained inside it (sim), you go to the top of the pile.