Robot Learning Engineer

We’re working with an early-stage robotics startup building AI-powered automation for the garment industry
, backed by Jeff Dean, Pieter Abbeel and senior leaders from OpenAI
.

They’re looking for a Founding Robot Learning Engineer to help build the core technology from the ground up.

This is a hands-on role spanning robot learning research, foundation model development and real-world robotics
.

• Research & problem decomposition: Break down challenging manipulation problems into testable hypotheses and resolve them through rapid experimentation.
• Core model development: Own architectures, training pipelines and evaluation systems for dexterous automation.
• Real-world experimentation: Collect data, train policies and evaluate them directly on physical robot platforms.
• Experiment infrastructure: Build and maintain simulation environments and commercial robot platforms to keep experiments running reliably.
• Push the boundaries of VLA, VLM, diffusion and world models for real-world robotic applications.
• Take models from pretraining and fine-tuning through to RL-based post-training and deployment
  .

• PhD or equivalent depth in robot learning
  , either through academic research or hands-on systems building.
• Strong experience training large-scale VLAs, VLMs, diffusion models or world models
  .
• Experience taking models through the full lifecycle, from pretraining and fine-tuning to RL-based post-training
  .
• A track record of shipping learned policies on real hardware
  , including data collection, training and evaluation.
• Excited by the opportunity to work at an early-stage company and have significant ownership over the direction of the technology.