Entry-Level Robotics ML Research Assistant

Generalist; Somerville (MA); On-site; USD 70,000 - 95,000; Full time

Job summary

Generalist is seeking a Research Assistant to design, run, and analyze experiments at the intersection of machine learning and robotics. This entry‑level role targets individuals with less than 3 years of ML research experience and offers a path toward becoming a Research Scientist.

You will work with ML researchers and robotics engineers to run robot experiments, collect data, interpret results, and document repeatable workflows, emphasizing experimental design, controls, and statistical rigor.

Qualifications

• Entry-level research role for individuals with less than 3 years of machine learning research experience.

Responsibilities

• Running structured experiments on robot platforms.
• Setting up physical tasks, materials, fixtures, and benchmarks for robot evaluations.
• Collecting high-quality robot data and tracking experimental conditions.
• Measuring real-world success rates across tasks, robots, and model variants.
• Designing evaluations with attention to controls, repeatability, statistical rigor, and sources of bias.
• Analyzing results to help distinguish real model improvements from noise.
• Synthesizing findings and communicating them clearly to ML researchers and engineers.
• Preparing robots, sensors, workspaces, and materials for rollouts and evaluations.
• Helping kick off training jobs, run evaluations, and organize results.
• Beta testing internal and third-party tools for teaching robots new skills.
• Troubleshooting physical setups, hardware issues, and procedural bottlenecks.
• Writing clear documentation and playbooks so others can reproduce workflows.
• Improving experimental reliability, data quality, and operational throughput over time

Skills

Experimentation

Data collection

Statistical rigor

Hands-on hardware

Documentation

Communication

Education

B.S. in CS/Engineering

Tools

Python

Lab equipment

Job description

Generalist is seeking a Research Assistant to design, run, and analyze experiments at the intersection of machine learning and robotics. This entry‑level role targets individuals with less than 3 years of ML research experience and offers a path toward becoming a Research Scientist.

You will work with ML researchers and robotics engineers to run robot experiments, collect data, interpret results, and document repeatable workflows, emphasizing experimental design, controls, and statistical rigor.