Research Engineer / Scientist (Robot Learning)
$250k - $350k • San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 2mo ago
Job Location
San Francisco
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
Machine Learning Engineer
About the job
World Labs is a frontier AI research and product company focused on spatial intelligence. We are pioneering world models that perceive, generate, reason, and interact with virtual and physical worlds, with our flagship product Marble transforming text, images, and video into navigable 3D worlds. We are seeking a strong Robot Learning Engineer/Scientist to develop and advance state-of-the-art methods for robot policies, emphasizing sim-to-real transfer, robust performance, and scalable training pipelines. This hands-on, research-driven role involves collaboration with research scientists, ML engineers, and system teams to translate robotic policies into production-ready systems.
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 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 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
- PhD in robotics, machine learning, computer science, or a closely related field is strongly preferred.
- 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 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, engineering rigor, correctness, stability, and measurable improvements.
- Enjoy collaborating with a high-caliber team and raising the technical bar.
Benefits
- Generous health, dental, and vision benefits.
- 401K benefits.
- Flexible PTO.
- Paid parental leave.
- Relocation support.