Principal Scientist: Robot Learning & Real-World AI

Sanctuary AI; Vancouver; On-site; CAD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Sanctuary AI seeks a Principal Scientist to advance robot learning capabilities and validate approaches through focused, high-leverage projects. You will scope experiments, run hands-on validation, and drive translation of research into production-ready systems.

You will lead the design and execution of scalable data pipelines, collaborate across teams, and push the boundaries of RL, imitation learning, and world models for robotics.

Qualifications

• Ph.D. in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, or equivalent practical background in robot learning.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience implementing and deploying robotic manipulation tasks, both in simulation and on physical robots.
• Experience transitioning Machine Learning research and trained models into real-world production.
• Active involvement integrating Machine Learning models into a robotics platform.
• Strong technical judgment and the ability to form and defend an independent point of view.
• Independently able to evaluate a landscape, propose an approach, complete a proof-of-concept and document and articulate the results to a cross-functional team.

Responsibilities

• Identify, scope, and lead research initiatives, working with contributors from across the company.
• Design and run experiments that validate early hypotheses, surfacing what works and what does not.
• Demonstrate the merit of new approaches through hands-on experimentation, building evidence for production readiness.
• Translate ML research and trained models into real-world robotic products in collaboration with engineering.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

TensorFlow

ROS2

Robot learning concepts

Education

Ph.D. in ML/CS/Applied Math

Job description

Sanctuary AI seeks a Principal Scientist to advance robot learning capabilities and validate approaches through focused, high-leverage projects. You will scope experiments, run hands-on validation, and drive translation of research into production-ready systems.

You will lead the design and execution of scalable data pipelines, collaborate across teams, and push the boundaries of RL, imitation learning, and world models for robotics.