Founding Research Engineer, Robot Learning

About the Role

Join a physical AI data infrastructure team as its first robot learning hire. You will train robot policies on synthetic data, rigorously measure their impact, and use the results to guide product and data development. The role works closely with engineering and product colleagues in Paris and helps build a robotics team in the San Francisco Bay Area.

What You'll Do

• Train and fine-tune robot policies using methods such as VLA fine-tuning, imitation learning, diffusion policies, and reinforcement learning in simulation.

• Evaluate manipulation, grasping, and navigation policies using public evaluation suites and controlled comparisons with fixed seeds, checkpoints, and protocols.

• Measure the impact of training data, report improvements and failures, and use evaluation results to guide the next training iteration.

• Translate findings into written data specifications describing what to generate, at what fidelity, and with what variation.

• Publish and demonstrate results at robotics venues and contribute to customer technical discussions.

• Help hire and lead the Bay Area robotics team as it grows.

What We're Looking For

• At least 6 years of hands-on robot learning experience in industry or a university research lab.

• Experience training manipulation or grasping policies and navigation policies in simulation.

• Experience with controlled experiments that vary training data while holding evaluation conditions consistent.

• A track record of using evaluation results to inform data or simulation changes, and translating findings into clear data specifications.

• Experience publishing or demonstrating robot learning results at venues such as CoRL, RSS, or ICRA.

• Experience hiring or leading a robotics team.

• Familiarity with Python, PyTorch, NVIDIA Isaac Sim or Isaac Lab, MuJoCo, USD, diffusion policy, OpenVLA, ACT, behavior cloning, and sim-to-real transfer.

• Current US work authorization is required.

Compensation & Benefits

Annual salary range: $260,000 to $300,000. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

Hybrid role based in San Francisco, United States.