Senior Roboticist

Astera Institute is a private foundation supporting ambitious work in science and technology through grants, investments, and in-house research. Its research programs combine the pace and autonomy of a startup with the freedom to pursue difficult scientific questions. Learn more about Astera’s mission /vision.

We are building a frontier robotics lab at Astera Institute. We believe neuroscience and AI will converge in embodied intelligence: animals and robots face shared challenges of perceiving their surroundings, navigating, manipulating objects, and using memory and reasoning to accomplish tasks in the physical world. Robotics provides a powerful testbed for investigating how biological neural circuits solve these challenges and for developing AI systems that turn perception, learning, and cognition into effective action.

Our strategy starts with making robots useful, while developing a mechanistic understanding of how neural circuits can generate intelligent behavior. We aim to continually expand the repertoire of behaviors a robot can perform reliably in real environments, while improving its ability to learn new skills, adapt to changing conditions, and recover from failure. These practical capabilities provide both measurable outcomes and a foundation for investigating deeper principles of intelligence.

Building on our existing research results and working robotic systems, we are seeking a few senior roboticists to advance our robotics capabilities and lead technical execution.

You will contribute to the robotics research and engineering effort within a multidisciplinary team spanning robotics, AI, and computational neuroscience. Your focus will be advancing robot capabilities, coordinating execution across the robotics stack, and translating research into reliable performance on physical systems.

Working closely with the lab’s leadership, you will turn scientific priorities into concrete robotics programs, recruit and mentor robotics researchers and engineers, and establish rigorous technical standards. You will bring deep robotics expertise and the ability to collaborate with colleagues in AI and neuroscience, connecting their contributions to functioning robotic systems.

This is a hands-on leadership role on research and/or engineering. You should be comfortable evaluating a learning architecture, reviewing a control or perception pipeline, designing a decisive experiment, and working directly with the team to resolve difficult technical bottlenecks.

• Advance useful robotic capabilities. Expand the range of skills robots can perform reliably, with clear improvements in task success, generalization, learning efficiency, adaptation, and recovery from failure.

• Help design and execute the robotics roadmap. Work with the lab’s leadership to translate scientific priorities into coordinated projects across perception, learning, simulation, control, hardware integration, and deployment. Help define milestones, coordinate technical efforts, and resolve dependencies to deliver reliable robotic capabilities.

• Connect research to physical systems. Guide work from algorithm development and simulation through real-world deployment. Establish effective cycles of data collection, training, evaluation, failure analysis, and improvement.

• Recruit and develop robotics talent. Help recruit for robotics research and engineering roles, including candidate sourcing, technical evaluation, and onboarding. Mentor team members and develop their technical judgment and leadership.

• Solve critical technical problems. Contribute directly to experimental design, algorithms, software, and system architecture. Investigate failures and help the team…