Research Engineer-AI Robotics

Croutch & Associates partners with high-growth startups, venture-backed technology companies, and innovative organizations to help them build world-class teams. We combine recruiting expertise, operational excellence, and AI-powered workflows to deliver exceptional hiring outcomes for our clients.

Our client is an early-stage, well-funded robotics company building general-purpose robots to automate physical labor, beginning with bi-manual manipulators for industrial applications. Industrial labor represents nearly $1 trillion in annual U.S. spending, with hundreds of thousands of unfilled positions today. The company approaches robotics as a full-stack challenge, combining cutting-edge hardware, machine learning, and deployment infrastructure to achieve 99.9%+ real-world reliability.

Their small, highly technical team is advancing large-scale pretraining, reinforcement learning (RL) post-training, and the infrastructure required to scale both.

Research velocity, measured by experiments shipped each week, is the primary driver of progress toward building general-purpose robots. As a Research Engineer, you'll work directly with world-class researchers on large-scale pretraining and reinforcement learning (RL) post-training while owning the critical path from GPU training clusters to robots operating successfully in production environments.

• Implement model architectures and training strategies alongside researchers while optimizing performance at scale.
• Build and maintain robust data pipelines for collection, curation, filtering, and augmentation across vision, proprioception, robotic actions, and language.
• Own training infrastructure, including distributed training, checkpointing, profiling, and debugging across GPU clusters.
• Develop evaluation systems that detect regressions and generate meaningful offline and real-world robotic performance insights.
• Manage the end-to-end deployment pipeline, taking models from training clusters to robots in the field while incorporating production data to continuously improve performance.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals with deep machine learning expertise.
• Experience implementing machine learning models end-to-end, not simply using existing frameworks.
• Hands-on experience with PyTorch or JAX.
• Experience with distributed machine learning training.
• Ability to debug issues across the full technology stack.
• Comfortable working in fast-paced, highly ambiguous startup environments.

• Experience with large-scale distributed training infrastructure across multi-node, multi-GPU environments.
• Experience working with large multimodal models.
• Publications at leading ML or robotics conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CoRL, RSS, ICRA, or similar.
• Experience deploying machine learning models to physical robotic hardware with a focus on latency optimization and edge computing.
• Base salary: $250,000-$400,000
  , depending on experience.
• Competitive equity package.
• Full-time position.
• Visa sponsorship available for qualified candidates who can start quickly.
• Opportunity to join a rapidly growing engineering team building next-generation robotics technology.