Robotics Research Engineer

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

Physical Intelligence is seeking a Robotics Research Engineer to develop foundation models and learning algorithms for robots. This role involves working across hardware, software, and large-scale model training, from data collection to policy development and deployment. The engineer will create new data collection methods, develop vision-language-action models, curate datasets, and run experiments to improve policy performance.

What you'd actually do

  1. Build autonomous robot policies that operate robustly in the real world.
  2. Work across the full stack of robot learning, from hardware and data collection to training, evaluation, and deployment.
  3. Create new data collection methods and pipelines to generate the high-quality data that powers state-of-the-art robot models.
  4. Develop and refine vision-language-action models and learning algorithms for general-purpose manipulation and control.
  5. Curate and shape large-scale datasets, task distributions, and training recipes for robot pretraining and adaptation.

Skills

Required

  • Experience training machine learning models for robot control
  • Hands-on experience with the robotics full stack
  • Strong software engineering and infrastructure skills
  • Ability to move seamlessly between research and implementation
  • Comfort working hands on with robotic hardware

Nice to have

  • policies that have been deployed and validated on real robots
  • controls
  • robot runtime software
  • perception
  • state estimation
  • SLAM
  • basic hardware bring-up and debugging
  • building data pipelines
  • training systems
  • evaluation frameworks
  • tools for rapid iteration

What the JD emphasized

  • high-quality training data
  • high-quality data
  • robot learning intuition
  • practical engineering ability
  • deployed and validated on real robots
  • robotics full stack
  • basic hardware bring-up and debugging
  • rapid iteration
  • end to end

Other signals

  • foundation models
  • learning algorithms
  • vision-language-action models
  • robot learning