Applied Researcher

Physical Intelligence Physical Intelligence · AI Frontier · San Francisco, CA · AI & Robotics Research

This role focuses on deploying and debugging learned policies on physical robots, involving training and tuning policies, writing production-quality code, and debugging the full stack. It bridges research and operations by translating research advances into deployable systems and gathering feedback from real-world failures. The role requires hands-on experience with robot deployment, strong engineering skills, and a practical, debugging-oriented mindset.

What you'd actually do

  1. Deploy and debug learned policies on physical robots, diagnosing failures across the full stack (perception, policy, control, hardware).
  2. Train and tune policies, curate data, and iterate to improve real-world performance.
  3. Write production-quality code that interfaces with Pi’s infrastructure.
  4. Work with operators to set up tests, evals, and data collection pipelines.
  5. Engage with partners to understand use cases and observe robots in deployment contexts.

Skills

Required

  • Python
  • debugging
  • robotics
  • autonomous systems
  • perception
  • policy
  • control
  • hardware

Nice to have

  • early-stage robotics or AV company experience
  • robot manipulation platforms
  • policy training intuition
  • neural network debugging intuition
  • data curation intuition

What the JD emphasized

  • deploying robots or autonomous systems in real-world environments
  • debug the full stack from perception to control
  • policy training
  • neural network debugging
  • data curation

Other signals

  • deploying learned policies on physical robots
  • train and tune policies
  • production-quality code
  • debug the full stack from perception to control
  • bridge research and operations