About the role
- Model and characterize robot manipulators: kinematics, dynamics, coordinate frames, calibration.
- Build and maintain robot models and simulation environments, and keep sim behavior faithful to the real arms.
- Bring up hardware: servo/motor control, sensor integration, teleoperation and data-collection rigs.
- Work at the boundary between classical control and learned policies - turning a policy's output into safe, reliable motion on hardware.
- Creation of data flywheel for model fine-tuning for multiple tasks and embodiments
- Set up evaluation: reproducible benchmarks in sim and on the robot, with honest metrics.
- Debug the messy real-world failures that never show up in a paper.
- 1–3 years of hands-on robotics experience (industry, research lab, or a serious body of personal/open-source work).
- Strong grounding in classical robotics: forward/inverse kinematics, rigid-body dynamics, trajectory generation, feedback control, transforms.
- Experience with robot modeling (e.g. URDF / MJCF / SDF) and at least one physics simulator (MuJoCo, Isaac Sim/Gym, Gazebo, PyBullet, or similar).
- Proficient in Python and C++.
- Comfortable on Linux, with Git, and working close to hardware.
- Clear communicator who can reason from first principles and validate claims against real data or source code rather than intuition alone.
- A portfolio of robotics work - repos, demos, videos, publications, competition entries, or a personal project we can look at.
- Exposure to learning-based robotics: imitation learning, VLA models, or RL for control.
- Hands-on time with real manipulators and grippers.
- Perception experience (depth cameras, point clouds, hand-eye calibration).
- Background in optimization or optimal control.
- Familiarity with the LeRobot / OpenVLA ecosystem.
- Real robots, real deployment targets, short loop from idea to hardware.
- A team strong in controls, safety, and systems - you'll learn fast.