Robotic Motion Planning Engineer Jobs in Bothell, WA

Overview
Microsoft's Discovery and Quantum (MDQ) division develops and delivers advanced artificial intelligence (AI), cloud-enabled capabilities, and strategic technologies to help solve the world's major challenges. From accelerating scientific discovery with advanced AI tools, to pioneering breakthroughs in quantum computing, to advancing robotics and AI capabilities that drive real-world impact, joining MDQ means building the future, partnering with fast-moving innovators, and operating in a high-impact, mission-driven environment.
At Microsoft Robotics within MDQ, we build and deploy technologies that enable people, robots, and AI agents to collaborate and achieve more.
We are building Microsoft's platform for physical intelligence-an integrated robotics software and AI platform that brings together humans, robots, and agents through robotics AI models, innovative teaming solutions and experiences, physically grounded agentic AI workflows, trustworthy test and evaluation, and real-world customer-focused validation. Built on Microsoft's core platforms and delivered through and with a global ecosystem of partners and customers, this platform accelerates AI for the physical world and helps robotics solutions move from experimentation to reliable, scaled deployment.
We are hiring a Member of Technical Staff, Microsoft Robotics (Perception) at the Senior level, to lead the development of perception, localization, mapping, and navigation capabilities that enable robots to understand and move through complex physical environments. This engineer will design and integrate production-quality autonomy systems that combine multi-sensor perception, SLAM, state estimation, semantic mapping, spatial reasoning, and navigation planning into reliable robot behavior. The role bridges advanced perception algorithms, physical world modeling, navigation stacks, simulation, and real-world deployment, with an emphasis on turning research-grade capabilities into robust systems that operate under latency, reliability, safety, and field-readiness constraints. This engineer will help define how Microsoft's robotics platform perceives, represents, reasons about, and navigates the physical world across heterogeneous robots, environments, and customer scenarios.
Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.
#MicrosoftRobotics #MDQ
Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, and integration of perception and navigation systems for robotic platforms, including SLAM, localization, mapping, sensor fusion, obstacle detection, semantic scene understanding, and motion planning interfaces.
• Develop robust state estimation and localization pipelines using data from cameras, depth sensors, LiDAR, IMUs, wheel odometry, proprioception, GPS, force/torque sensors, or other robot sensor modalities.
• Build spatial representations for navigation and planning, including occupancy maps, semantic maps, costmaps, 3D scene representations, traversability maps, object-level representations, and dynamic environment models.
• Integrate perception outputs with planning, control, simulation, and fleet operations systems to support safe and reliable robot autonomy in real-world environments.
• Architect perception-navigation pipelines that meet practical constraints for latency, bandwidth, compute efficiency, reliability, calibration drift, sensor degradation, and environmental variability.
• Develop evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, and telemetry-driven analysis methods to measure perception, localization, mapping, and navigation performance across simulation, lab, and field deployments.
• Partner with learning engineers, spatial AI engineers, simulation engineers, and platform engineers to connect classical robotics pipelines with modern AI models, including learned perception, physical world models, and data-driven navigation approaches.
• Analyze field logs, sensor data, planner behavior, and failure cases to identify root causes, improve system robustness, and drive cross-stack improvements across perception, planning, controls, and hardware integration.
• Lead technical design reviews, establish engineering patterns, and mentor other engineers on production-quality robotics autonomy development, testing, debugging, and deployment practices.
• Stay current with state-of-the-art research and industry practice in robotics perception, SLAM, VIO, sensor fusion, semantic mapping, spatial AI, navigation, and physical AI, assessing how new techniques should be incorporated into Microsoft's robotics platform.

Qualifications
Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
• OR equivalent experience.

Other Requirements:

• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings
  • Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
• OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
• OR equivalent experience.
• Deep experience developing robotics perception or navigation systems, including SLAM, visual-inertial odometry, LiDAR odometry, sensor fusion, state estimation, mapping, obstacle detection, semantic mapping, or traversability estimation.
• Systems-level understanding of how perception, localization, mapping, planning, and controls interact in deployed autonomous systems, including the failure modes and trade-offs that emerge at integration boundaries.
• Proficiency in C++ and Python with experience building performant, testable, production-quality robotics software.
• Experience with robotics middleware and tools such as ROS/ROS2, Nav2, MoveIt, Drake, Gazebo, Isaac Sim, RViz, Foxglove, or equivalent autonomy development and debugging environments.
• Experience integrating multi-sensor systems, including calibration, synchronization, sensor modeling, uncertainty handling, and robustness to noisy or degraded sensor inputs.
• Familiarity with modern perception and spatial AI methods, including 3D computer vision, point cloud processing, neural scene representations, semantic segmentation, object detection and tracking, scene graphs, or learned world models.
• Familiarity with learning-based navigation, imitation learning for navigation policies, or foundation models applied to planning and decision-making.
• Experience deploying perception and navigation systems on physical robots and debugging real-world issues such as localization drift, dynamic obstacles, changing lighting, reflective surfaces, network constraints, compute limitations, or environmental ambiguity.
• Experience designing autonomy evaluation frameworks, simulation-based validation pipelines, scenario-based testing, field test protocols, and quantitative metrics for localization, mapping, perception, and navigation performance.
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-disciplinary technical efforts involving robotics hardware, perception, planning, simulation, platform infrastructure, field testing, and AI/ML teams.
• Published research, open-source contributions, patents, or demonstrated technical leadership in robotics perception, SLAM, navigation, autonomous systems, spatial AI, or physical AI is a plus.

Software Engineering IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $160,200 - $261,000 per year.
Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay
This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.