Principal Software Engineer, Robotics Systems

Company: Qualcomm International, Inc. Australia Branch Office

Job Area: Engineering Group, Software Engineering

General Summary: As a Principal Software Engineer, you are a recognized technical authority responsible for defining, architecting, and delivering mission‑critical robotics software systems across multiple product generations. You operate with minimal direction, solve ambiguous and cross‑domain problems, and influence technical decisions beyond your immediate team. This role is not focused on people management, but on technical leadership at scale, owning end‑to‑end architecture, setting engineering standards, and unblocking complex system‑level challenges across hardware, software, and product teams.

Scope & Impact:

Own system‑level architecture for major subsystems (e.g., localization, navigation, sensor fusion).

Drive cross‑team technical alignment and influence roadmap decisions.

Anticipate future platform needs (compute, sensing, software abstractions) and design with multi‑year durability.

Be the go‑to expert for one or more deep technical areas while maintaining strong system breadth.

Key Responsibilities System Architecture & Product Translation

Independently translate product and platform requirements into software architecture, technical requirements, and measurable performance targets.

Define error budgets, latency budgets, and accuracy targets, and ensure they are met across sensing, compute, and execution pipelines.

Make and defend architectural tradeoffs across cost, performance, power, and robustness, with clear technical rationale.

Influence platform‑level decisions that impact multiple teams or product lines.

Localization, INS/GNSS, and Sensor Fusion

Architect and lead development of production‑grade INS/GNSS and multisensory fusion systems for robotics use cases such as indoor mapping, outdoor navigation, and humanoid locomotion.

Select and justify sensor fusion approaches (EKF/UKF, factor graphs, hybrid methods) based on performance, stability, and compute constraints.

Evaluate IMU and GNSS solutions (MEMS vs higher‑grade IMUs, RTK vs PPP) and guide system‑level integration decisions.

Design for real‑world failure modes including multipath, GNSS outages, time‑sync issues, and sensor drift, with robust recovery strategies.

Optimization, Estimation, and Real Time Control

Own the design of real‑time optimization and estimation components used in motion planning, control, or locomotion.

Select and adapt optimization techniques (QP, MPC, trajectory optimization) for embedded real‑time execution.

Drive solver‑level optimizations such as warm‑starting, sparsity exploitation, approximation, and numerical stabilization.

Ensure deterministic behavior under tight latency and memory budgets on heterogeneous compute platforms.

Embedded Software Engineering Excellence

Set the technical bar for high‑reliability embedded software in C/C++.

Design and review software architectures for modularity, testability, and long‑term maintainability.

Lead complex debugging efforts involving timing jitter, race conditions, memory corruption, or intermittent hardware faults.

Establish best practices for testing, diagnostics, fault handling, and system observability.

Technical Leadership & Influence

Act as a technical mentor to Senior and Staff engineers through design reviews, architecture discussions, and problem solving.

Lead technical reviews for high‑risk or high‑impact features.

Proactively identify technical risks and drive mitigation strategies before they impact delivery.

Represent the team in cross‑functional and cross‑organizational technical forums.

Required Qualifications (Principal Level)

15+ years of professional software engineering experience, with deep expertise in embedded systems, robotics, or real‑time software.

Demonstrated ownership of large, complex systems from architecture through production deployment.

Expert proficiency in C/C++, strong command of concurrency, memory management, and real‑time constraints.

Proven experience designing sensor fusion, localization, navigation, or control systems used in real products.

Strong applied background in estimation, optimization, or control theory.

Preferred Qualifications

Hands‑on experience with GNSS, RTK, PPP, IMU‑based navigation, or similar localization technologies.

Experience deploying algorithms on resource‑constrained or heterogeneous compute platforms (CPU/DSP/NPU).

Familiarity with robotics middleware and system integration (e.g., ROS2 based stacks).

Experience with safety‑critical or high‑reliability systems (robotics, automotive, aerospace).

Track record of influencing architecture across multiple teams or product areas.

Minimum Qualifications • Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field and 8+ years of Software Engineering or related work experience. • Master's degree in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field and 7+ years of Software Engineering or related work experience. • PhD in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field and 6+ years of Software Engineering or related work experience. • 4+ years of work experience with programming languages such as C, C++, Java, or Python.

Applicants Qualcomm is an equal‑opportunity employer. If you are an individual with a disability and need an accommodation during the application/hiring process, rest assured that Qualcomm is committed to providing an accessible process. You may e‑mail disability‑accomodations@qualcomm.com or call Qualcomm's toll‑free number. Upon request, Qualcomm will provide reasonable accommodations to support individuals with disabilities to participate in the hiring process. Qualcomm is also committed to making our workplace accessible for individuals with disabilities.

Recruiting Agencies Our Careers Site is only for individuals seeking a job at Qualcomm. Staffing and recruiting agencies and individuals being represented by an agency are not authorized to use this site or to submit profiles, applications or resumes, and any such submissions will be considered unsolicited. Qualcomm does not accept unsolicited resumes or applications from agencies.

Contact If you would like more information about this role, please contact Qualcomm Careers.

#J-18808-Ljbffr