Founding Research Engineer: Embodied AI for Robots

Mbodi; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Mbodi AI, an embodied AI startup, seeks a Founding Research Engineer to build the intelligence behind robots that can learn and adapt to new tasks. You will push the boundaries of agentic AI, enabling robots to understand language, reason about the physical world, and execute complex tasks reliably on real robots.

You’ll explore state-of-the-art foundation models, craft novel algorithms, and deploy research in a hands-on engineering role.

Qualifications

• Strong AI/ML foundations including transformers and foundation models.
• Ability to develop and evaluate novel AI algorithms for robots.
• Proven Python and ML framework experience (e.g., PyTorch).

Responsibilities

• Develop agent architectures for task planning, decision-making, and autonomous error recovery.
• Research and implement methods for robots to learn from language, demonstrations, and interaction.
• Advance multimodal perception and foundation model techniques for physical-world tasks.
• Translate research into working robotic systems and validate in real hardware.

Skills

Agentic AI

Multimodal models

Vision-language models

Robot learning

Reinforcement learning

Python

PyTorch

Systems thinking

Startup mindset

Education

Advanced degree in CS/ML/Robotics

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Job description

Mbodi AI, an embodied AI startup, seeks a Founding Research Engineer to build the intelligence behind robots that can learn and adapt to new tasks. You will push the boundaries of agentic AI, enabling robots to understand language, reason about the physical world, and execute complex tasks reliably on real robots.

You’ll explore state-of-the-art foundation models, craft novel algorithms, and deploy research in a hands-on engineering role.