Founding Research Engineer, Robot Learning
True Talent Solutions Partners · Posted Nov 12, 2026
- San Francisco, California, United States
- Hybrid
- Full-time · Senior
- $260K–$300K per year
- 6+ years
Join a physical AI data and infrastructure team as its first robot learning hire. You will train and evaluate robot policies using synthetic data, establish whether that data improves performance, and turn findings into public results and product requirements.
Compensation
Base salary: $260,000 to $300,000 annually.
Responsibilities
- Train robot policies using VLA fine-tuning, imitation learning, diffusion policies, or reinforcement learning in simulation, focusing initially on manipulation and grasping.
- Establish baselines on public evaluation suites and compare results with and without synthetic training data using controlled protocols.
- Report improvements and failures, then translate findings into data requirements covering generation, fidelity, and variation.
- Publish and demonstrate results to the robotics community and participate in customer technical discussions.
- Begin as an individual contributor and help hire and lead a growing Bay Area robotics team.
Requirements
- Graduate degree in robotics, machine learning, or a related field