Research Engineer / Scientist (Robot Learning)
$250k - $350k • San Francisco
Posted 20d ago
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Categories
AI Research Engineer
About the job
World Labs is a frontier AI research and product company focused on spatial intelligence, co-founded by Dr. Fei-Fei Li, Justin Johnson, and Ben Mildenhall. The company is developing world models that can perceive, generate, reason, and interact with virtual and physical worlds, with its flagship product Marble transforming text, images, and video into navigable 3D worlds. Backed by leading investors, World Labs is building a world-class team at the intersection of AI research and real-world deployment.
Responsibilities
- Design and implement modern robot learning systems, including imitation learning and reinforcement learning for manipulation.
- Research, prototype, and productionize robotic policies with a focus on speed, precision, and scalability.
- Develop and improve training pipelines for sim-to-real transfer, including domain randomization, system identification, and real-sim alignment.
- Collaborate with simulation and infrastructure teams to minimize the sim-to-real gap and ensure clean integration with real-robot deployment stacks.
- Build end-to-end training and evaluation workflows for robot policies, from large-scale data generation to scaled training and evaluation.
- Optimize policy performance across the stack, including training speed, inference latency, and data generation efficiency.
- Diagnose failure modes in simulation and real-world rollouts and design principled solutions to improve robustness, efficiency, and generalization.
- Contribute to technical direction by proposing new research ideas, mentoring teammates, and setting best practices for robot learning.
Requirements
- 6+ years of experience in manipulation, locomotion, robot policy training, or related areas.
- Strong foundation in robotics, neural network designs, and sim-real transfer.
- Deep experience with robot policy designs (e.g., VLA, WAM, diffusion).
- Proficiency in Python and/or C++ with hands-on experience building research or production robotic systems.
- Experience with deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch) and low-level robotic controllers.
- Proven ability to work in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and drive projects from concept through deployment.
- Strong sense of ownership and engineering rigor, with a focus on correctness, stability, and measurable improvements.
- Enjoy collaborating with a high-caliber team and raising the technical bar through thoughtful design, experimentation, and code quality.