Research Engineer, Robotics Evals
$100k - $230k • Remote • San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 15d ago
Job Location
San Francisco
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
Fully remote
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
AI Research Engineer
About the job
HUD is building reliable, fair, and open infrastructure for AI data, aiming to make data valuable for creators and trustworthy for AI labs. As a Research Engineer on the Robotics team, you will develop datasets and evaluations crucial for training and assessing embodied AI systems. This role involves translating research needs into data specifications, creating methods for data validation, and conducting experiments to understand how data characteristics impact model performance. You will collaborate with internal research and engineering teams, and potentially with data vendors and buyers, to enhance robotics data offerings.
Responsibilities
- Research data needs for robot learning and physical AI systems, translating them into dataset and evaluation specifications.
- Define data schemas, annotations, ground truth, and quality standards for various robotics data types.
- Design data collection and review protocols for external providers.
- Build tools and validation workflows to audit datasets, identify quality issues, and provide feedback to providers.
- Run experiments and analyze model behavior to understand the impact of data quality, coverage, and structure on performance.
- Collaborate with internal teams and external vendors/buyers to improve robotics data offerings.
Requirements
- Experience in robotics, robot learning, embodied AI, or related multimodal research.
- Proficiency in Python and experience building data processing, analysis, or evaluation tools.
- Experience translating research questions into dataset specifications, experiments, and quality criteria.
- Strong understanding of what makes robotics data useful and potentially misleading for training or evaluation.
- Attention to detail for spotting errors, coverage gaps, and failure modes in complex data.
- Experience building research tools or pipelines without a fully prescribed roadmap.
- Experience with robot trajectories, demonstrations, video, sensor data, simulation, or other multimodal robotics datasets.
- Experience with imitation learning, reinforcement learning, or vision-language-action models.
- Experience in unstructured problem spaces and taking ownership from research to deployment.
- Early-stage startup experience and strong communication skills.
Benefits
- Competitive compensation
- 100% covered top-of-the-line medical, dental, and vision (US and Singapore employees)
- Lunch and dinner for in-office employees
- Company-wide holiday break (Christmas Eve to New Year’s Day) on top of PTO and paid holidays
- Equinox membership
- 401k
- Commuter benefits (US employees)
- Health/wellness stipend (Singapore employees)
- Unlimited access to tokens for ChatGPT, Claude Code, Cursor, etc.
- Annual travel budget to visit either office