Staff Research Scientist – Robotics & Machine Learning
Location: Vancouver (Hybrid – at least 2 days onsite)
Compensation: $200–300k base + equity
A pioneering robotics and AI team is hiring a Staff Research Scientist to push the boundaries of embodied intelligence. In this role, you’ll work end to end across research, simulation, and real-world deployment, developing ML-driven control systems for dexterous humanoid robots.
You’ll shape the direction of reinforcement and imitation learning research, design scalable training and data pipelines, run large-scale simulation experiments, and bring cutting-edge algorithms onto robots equipped with advanced sensing capabilities. This is a rare opportunity to contribute research that transitions directly into physical, real-world performance.
What You’ll Do
• Develop and advance RL/IL algorithms for complex manipulation tasks
• Lead high-impact research directions and guide experimentation strategy
• Design training and data-collection systems that speed up deployment
• Improve efficiency, reliability, scalability, and compute performance of learning systems
• Run experiments in simulation and on real robots, debugging end to end
• Diagnose failures and design robust, production-ready solutions
• Collaborate closely with ML researchers, robotics engineers, and applied teams
What We’re Looking For
• PhD in ML, Robotics, Computer Science, Applied Math, or equivalent expertise
• 5+ years building and deploying robotic manipulation systems (simulation + real robots)
• 5+ years hands-on experience with RL/IL for real-world robotics
• 4+ years developing large-scale parallel simulation pipelines
• Strong background in continual learning and sim-to-real transfer
• Experience transitioning ML research into production robotic systems
• Publication record in top-tier robotics/AI venues (ICRA, IROS, CoRL)
Technical Strengths
• Expert Python
• Proficiency with PyTorch or TensorFlow
• Experience with ROS2 and parallel compute (CUDA, OpenMP)
• Deep understanding of RL theory and practical implementation
