Senior / Staff AI Research Engineer, Data Infrastructure
$185k - $325k • Milpitas, CA • Full-time
Posted 10mo ago
This job has been open for more than 60 days. It may no longer be actively hiring, so check with the company before putting a lot into an application.
Job Location
Milpitas, CA
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
Full-time
Categories
AI Research Engineer
About the job
RoboForce is an AI robotics company developing Physical AI-powered Robo-Labor for dull, dirty, and dangerous work. The company's robots are engineered for demanding industrial environments, with a focus on real-world deployment and scalability. We are looking for a Senior / Staff AI Research Engineer, Data Infrastructure to build the data and learning engine behind RoboForce's Physical AI stack. In this role, you will own the full pipeline — from raw teleoperation and UMI device data collection through curation, annotation, and storage, to post-training infrastructure that scores demonstrations, identifies failure patterns, and closes the loop back into model retraining.
Responsibilities
- Design and maintain end-to-end data collection pipelines for multimodal demonstration data from teleoperation devices and UMI hardware, including synchronization, versioning, and distributed storage.
- Build annotation tooling and data curation workflows for quality filtering, deduplication, episode scoring, and domain reweighting to produce high-quality training datasets.
- Develop post-SFT reinforcement learning infrastructure, including reward scoring on demonstrations, mining failure patterns, and feeding curated failure data back into the retraining loop.
- Build evaluation and test infrastructure to log policy rollouts on-robot, capture structured results, and surface actionable diagnostics.
- Collaborate with ML researchers to define data schemas, episode formats, and pipeline interfaces for rapid iteration on VLA and manipulation policy training.
- Architect scalable storage and retrieval systems for heterogeneous robot data (vision, proprioception, action, language) across cloud and on-prem environments.
Requirements
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Robotics, or related field with 5+ years of experience.
- Strong proficiency in Python and experience building production-grade data pipelines and ETL systems.
- Hands-on experience with large-scale dataset management, including versioning, deduplication, quality filtering, and distributed storage (e.g., S3, GCS, HDF5, WebDataset, Zarr).
- Experience building or working with post-training infrastructure such as SFT pipelines, reward modeling, or RL training loops (e.g., PPO, DPO, rejection sampling).
- Familiarity with deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, JAX) and ML training workflows.
- Requires 5 days/week in-office collaboration.
Benefits
- Competitive stock options/equity programs.
- Health, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k) plan.
- Visa sponsorship and green card support for qualified candidates.
- Lunches and dinners, a fully stocked kitchen, and regular team-building events.