Junior Robotics Engineer

Cota Robotics puts robots to work in retail stores. They take on the repetitive, time-consuming jobs like inbounding goods, replenishing shelves and sorting stock, currently mostly overnight. They're driven from our control room in Stockholm and increasingly run on their own. We raised a €1.92M pre-seed in August 2026 and are live with retailers in Sweden and Finland. We're a small team based at Sankt Eriksgatan in Stockholm, where half the office is our own dark store.

About the role

You’ll build the autonomy that lets our robots work shelves and pallets in live stores. This is a software role: you’ll work closely with hardware, but you won’t design it. We care about what works in a store at 6am, not what wins a benchmark, and that usually means combining learned policies with classical methods rather than picking a side.

What you’ll do

• Develop and deploy manipulation and navigation policies on real robots in real stores
• Work with VLAs and modern learned control alongside classical planning, perception, and control
• Decide which approach fits which problem, and be right about it often enough
• Own problems from store observation to shipped behavior

What we’re looking for

• Hands-on experience getting software to run on real robots, not only in simulation
• Clear on the tradeoffs between classical and learned approaches
• A fast learner who can define the problem before solving it
• Comfortable with chaos and speed
• We expect to fill this role in November or December 2026
• You must already have the right to work in Sweden, as unfortunately, we’re not able to offer visa sponsorship at our current stage

How to apply: We highly encourage you to tell us about something you built or shipped and link to it (repo, video, paper, or project).

Why join

• Work on practical autonomy problems in live retail environments
• Build systems that ship to stores, not just demos or benchmarks
• Influence technical direction early
• Take meaningful ownership in a fast-moving team