Senior Autonomy Controls Engineer – Learning-Based Control

Teleo

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Palo Alto, CA on site Until 8/21/2026 First posted February 18, 2026 Last posted February 18, 2026
Job description

Teleo, a Havoc company, is a robotics company that transforms construction heavy equipment, including loaders, dozers, excavators, and trucks, into autonomous robots for commercial and defense applications. Our technology enables a single operator to supervise and control multiple machines simultaneously, delivering significant productivity gains while improving operator safety and comfort.

Teleo was founded by a team of experienced technology leaders who previously led the development of Lyft's Self-Driving Car program and Google Street View. Teleo recently announced its merger with Havoc AI, a fast-growing defense technology company developing coordinated fleets of autonomous maritime vessels.

This is a unique opportunity to join a team building technology with real-world impact. You will work on cutting-edge 100,000-pound autonomous robots and engineer complex systems at the intersection of hardware, software, robotics, and AI.


About the Role
 
Own the transition from manually tuned MPC-based vehicle control to learning-driven control policies that adapt across vehicles with minimal human intervention, while maintaining safety and interpretability.

Core Responsibilities

  • Practical understanding of vehicle dynamics and system identification
  • Practical experience in generating test plans, collecting real-world data, and using real-world data for system identification of plant models for automatic control.
  • Design and implement learning-based control approaches (imitation learning, reinforcement learning, hybrid MPC + learning)
  • Reduce dependence on hand-tuned control parameters through data-driven methods
  • Integrate learned controllers into the existing vehicle control stack safely and incrementally
  • Define interfaces between classical control (MPC, PID, state estimation) and learning-based components
  • Work closely with the Principal Controls Engineer to translate classical control insights into learning-friendly formulations
  • Establish validation criteria for learned control policies before real-vehicle deployment

Required Qualifications

  • 2-3 years of experience with experimental data collection and data analysis to estimate parameters of a plant model used for automatic control
  • Strong software engineering skills in C, C++, or Python (production-quality code)
  • Deep understanding of modern robotics control systems
  • Experience with learning-based control or policy optimization for real-world systems
  • Comfort working close to hardware and real-time constraints

Preferred Qualification

  • Reinforcement learning or imitation learning for control
  • Model-based RL, residual learning, or hybrid MPC architectures
  • Control under uncertainty and partial observability
  • Debugging and validating control systems on physical platforms

Bonus Points

  • Experience deploying learned controllers on vehicles or mobile robots
  • Familiarity with safety-constrained learning methods
  • Background spanning both classical and modern control theory
Teleo is an equal opportunity employer and we value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. All qualified people are encouraged to apply.
About this role

Summary

Develop learning-based control policies for autonomous vehicles integrating data analysis with control systems.

Job title

Senior Autonomy Controls Engineer – Learning-Based Control

Experience level

2-3 years

Industry

robotics

Location requirements

Palo Alto, CA, on-site work required

Salary

Not specified

Management role

No

Skills & keywords

Required skills

CC++Pythonsystem identificationmodern robotics control

Preferred skills

reinforcement learningimitation learningcontrol under uncertaintyvalidation on physical platforms

Specializations

vehicle dynamicssystem identificationlearning-based controlreinforcement learningmodel-based RL
Locations

Structured locations inferred from the posting.

Palo Alto, CA, USA

On-site City