Application Engineer (f/m/d)

About TACTILIA

At TACTILIA, we are building the industry-ready robotic hand that closes one of the biggest gaps in Physical AI. Spun out of SCHUNK, the global market leader in gripping technology, we combine a decade of robotic-hand expertise and real industrial access with the speed and ambition of a deep-tech startup.

This isn't a research project waiting for its first customer. We already have a product, customers are ready to use it, and we are launching now. Your work will directly shape the electronics, actuators, and embedded systems that make that possible.

You will join at the moment when the hard engineering questions become real product decisions: how do we make a highly capable robotic hand reliable, manufacturable, serviceable, and simple enough to deploy on a real shop floor?

The Role

You are the bridge between a customer use case and our product. You take a task described on the shop floor, turn it into a working robot application, and translate what you learn back into concrete product requirements.

You work on humanoid and industrial platforms, in our lab and at customer sites. You are close to the hardware, responsible for making applications work in practice, and know whether a grasp still holds after ten thousand cycles.

You report to the CTO and work closely with Product, Software and Electronics.

What you will do:

Use case to requirement. Analyse customer applications on site, understand their technical and operational constraints, and derive specific, testable product requirements.

Skill implementation. Implement and optimise grasping and manipulation skills on real hardware — including parameterisation, grasp strategies, task sequences and error recovery.

Testing. Design and run application-level tests covering endurance, cycle testing, grasp success rates, robustness to object and position variance, and reproducibility.

High-level control & integration. Integrate our hands into humanoid and industrial robots, including mechanical and electrical interfacing, commissioning, task-level programming and sequencing.

Teleoperation & robot learning. Set up and operate teleoperation systems, record high-quality demonstrations for imitation learning, and support reinforcement-learning workflows including sim-to-real validation.

Demo setups & showcases. Build reliable demonstrators for trade fairs, customer visits and pilot projects that can run repeatedly under real-world conditions.

Shop floor deployment. Take applications from the lab into production environments, addressing cycle times, safety, system interfaces and integration with existing automation.

Feedback into development. Capture field findings, failure modes and product limitations and work with Product and Engineering to translate them into concrete improvements.

Documentation & enablement. Document applications, integration procedures and test results, and support customers and partners during deployment.

What you bring:

Degree in mechatronics, robotics, automation, mechanical or electrical engineering, or a comparable qualification.

3–8 years of experience in robot applications, commissioning, systems integration or automation engineering.

Practical experience programming and commissioning industrial robots or cobots, with the confidence to work on live robotic cells.

Strong Python skills; C++ is an advantage.

Experience with ROS 2 and simulation environments such as Isaac Sim, Gazebo, MuJoCo or comparable platforms.

Structured approach to testing — you design tests that produce measurable, reproducible results.

Hands-on mentality — you are comfortable building fixtures, wiring systems, commissioning hardware and running tests yourself.

Willingness to travel to customer sites and trade fairs, approximately 20–30%.

Fluent in English and German.

Bonus:

Experience with grasping technology, end-of-arm tooling or dexterous manipulation.

Experience with teleoperation systems, motion capture or VR-based robot control.

Practical experience with imitation learning, behaviour cloning or reinforcement learning.

Experience with humanoid or mobile manipulation platforms.

Experience with machine vision and object detection in robotic applications.

Knowledge of risk assessment and safety for collaborative applications, including the Machinery Regulation and ISO/TS 15066.

The next chapter of robotics won't be built in a lab. It will be built by people who care about what happens when technology meets the real world.

At TACTILIA, you'll work on one of the hardest open problems in robotics: giving machines the dexterity, reliability and robustness to interact with the physical world at industrial scale.

The technology is taking shape, the team is being built, and the standards around robotic hands and their skills are still open. That means your decisions will have a lasting impact — not just on a product, but on what comes next for Physical AI.

Build the hand. Define the standard. Shape what comes next.

If you're excited by the challenge of building robotic hands that works reliably in the real world, we'd love to hear from you.

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