Robotics/Hardware Engineer or Simulation Engineer

Lumen Labs | Robotics/Hardware Engineer, Simulation Engineer | San Francisco, CA | ONSITE | Full-time

Compensation: $150k–200k + equity
Location: San Francisco, CA — ONSITE
Website: https://lumenresearch.co
Source: Hacker News

About Lumen Labs

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:

• Own the ROS2 (Humble) stack across onboard and offboard compute.
• Sensor integration and calibration (LiDAR, depth, IMU, encoders).
• The safety pipeline during autonomous runs.
• 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.
• Can debug hardware and firmware at the same time.

Full posting: Robotics Engineer

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.
• Build task simulators for training and testing and keep 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.
• Test-driven.

Full posting: Simulation Engineer

How to Apply

Email hi@lumenresearch.co, 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.