Locomotion & Whole-Body Control Engineer - Humanoid (human)

The Locomotion & Whole‑Body Control Engineer will join the Humanoid Controls group in Zurich, contributing to the control intelligence that lets the company’s 4NE1 humanoid robot move, balance, manipulate objects and interact safely in real‑world settings. The role sits at the core of the robot’s control stack, linking trajectory planning, model‑predictive control and whole‑body execution. Day‑to‑day work involves creating algorithms for whole‑body motion generation, including walking, balancing, contact transitions and combined locomotion‑manipulation tasks. The engineer will design and implement trajectory‑optimization and MPC pipelines that account for robot state, contact schedules, ground reaction forces, centroidal momentum and joint trajectories. They will also build and maintain QP‑based whole‑body control and task‑space inverse‑dynamics frameworks that run on the hardware at up to 1 kHz, refine dynamic models, and enforce kinematic, dynamic, friction and joint‑limit constraints. Improving solver speed, numerical robustness and real‑time reliability, as well as deploying, tuning and validating the algorithms on the physical robot, are key activities. Development is carried out in high‑performance C++ for real‑time control, complemented by Python tools for analysis and prototyping, while collaborating closely with