Embodied AI Robotics Engineer

Astera Institute; Emeryville (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Astera Institute's Robotics Lab in Emeryville, CA seeks an engineer to take a learning-based robotics system from model development to real-world robot deployment. You’ll work across perception, policy learning, inference, and robot integration, connecting model predictions to actual robot actions.

You will collaborate with researchers and hardware engineers to develop manipulation capabilities, diagnose failures on real robots, and improve software and models together in a hands-on,

Qualifications

• Strong Python skills and practical experience training or fine-tuning models in PyTorch or a comparable framework.
• Experience integrating learning or perception systems with physical robots, including coordinate frames, sensor calibration, and action interfaces.
• Ability to profile software, identify runtime bottlenecks, and debug problems that span models, robotics software, and hardware.
• A track record of building working systems with clear technical contributions.
• Comfort collaborating with researchers and engineers and iterating from experiments.
• Experience with robot learning frameworks such as LeRobot or openpi is helpful but not required.
• Experience with model distillation and inference optimization with tools such as ONNX or TensorRT is helpful.

Responsibilities

• Develop models for robotic manipulation.
• Connect perception to action by building software that links sensors to model inference and robot commands.
• Optimize models for deployment on robot hardware, improving latency and throughput.
• Build responsive policy execution, including asynchronous inference and action chunking.
• Diagnose failures across the stack—from observations to motion—and build logging and evaluation tools.
• Build reusable robot software with clear interfaces and reproducible configurations.

Skills

Machine learning engineering

Physical robot integration

Systems debugging

Practical engineering experience

Technical collaboration

Robot learning experience

Inference optimization

Manipulation and policy execution

Tools

ONNX

TensorRT

Job description

Astera Institute's Robotics Lab in Emeryville, CA seeks an engineer to take a learning-based robotics system from model development to real-world robot deployment. You’ll work across perception, policy learning, inference, and robot integration, connecting model predictions to actual robot actions.

You will collaborate with researchers and hardware engineers to develop manipulation capabilities, diagnose failures on real robots, and improve software and models together in a hands-on,