Staff AI Engineer | Robot Autonomy

Teaching a robot to move an object across a table is one problem.

Teaching it to find that object in an unfamiliar home, navigate towards it, pick it up safely and bring it to someone is a very different one.

I’m working with an early-stage humanoid robotics company in Munich that is developing assistive robots for elderly people and their families. The technology has already been tested in real homes, and the next challenge is moving from individual demonstrations towards reliable autonomous behaviour.

They are now hiring a Staff AI Engineer to take ownership of the robot-learning stack across data collection, model training, evaluation and deployment onto physical hardware.

You will teach a physical robot to complete useful manipulation tasks in real domestic environments.

The robot can already perform static pick-and-place tasks and operate light switches. The next behaviours include locating requested objects within a room, navigating towards them, retrieving items from the floor, handing them to a person and helping with tasks such as opening a water bottle.

These tasks are not exceptionally complex in a controlled laboratory. The difficulty is making them work reliably across different homes, objects, lighting conditions, layouts and users.

You will own the complete learning loop rather than focusing on one isolated model or research problem.

• Designing real-world demonstration and data-collection workflows
• Training manipulation policies using learning from demonstration and behavioural cloning
• Applying reinforcement learning where it provides a practical improvement
• Adapting existing foundation models rather than building a general-purpose model from scratch
• Evaluating policies on physical robots and understanding why they fail
• Deploying models onto real robotic systems
• Improving performance using data collected from deployed robots
• Building repeatable training, evaluation and deployment workflows
• Working closely with the robot platform and data infrastructure engineers
• Helping define the long‑term autonomy architecture as the robot fleet grows

The likely technical direction includes existing VLM and VLA systems, NVIDIA GR00T, Pi-style models, diffusion policies, world models and action-chunking approaches.

The expected balance is approximately 60% engineering and deployment, with 40% research
. This is a hands‑on individual‑contributor role rather than a research‑management position.

• Experience taking a learning-based manipulation system from data collection through to deployment on a physical robot.
• End-to-end robot learning on real hardware
• Manipulation, rather than perception alone
• Learning from demonstration, imitation learning or behavioural cloning
• Practical reinforcement‑learning knowledge
• Strong Python and modern deep‑learning frameworks
• C++ and strong general software‑engineering foundations
• ROS2
• Robot kinematics, dynamics and control
• Training, evaluating and deploying policies on physical robots
• Debugging failures involving calibration, latency, contact, data quality and hardware variation
• Taking ownership of ambiguous technical problems without waiting for a complete specification

A strong publication record is useful, but it will not replace evidence that you have built and deployed a working system.

Candidates whose experience is limited to simulation, object segmentation, grasp detection or isolated motion‑planning research are unlikely to be close enough to the problem.

• Diffusion policies or diffusion transformers
• Action chunking
• Bimanual or mobile manipulation
• Humanoid or dexterous robotics
• Jetson deployment and inference optimisation
• Compliant actuation or force-sensitive manipulation
• Continual or distributed learning systems
• Open-source robot-learning projects
• Experience collecting demonstrations through teleoperation

• Humanoid robotics
• Dexterous manipulation
• Warehouse picking
• Academic robot-learning groups with substantial hardware ownership

The product is intended to support elderly people who want to retain more independence within their own homes.

This is not a…