Research Engineer – Robotics & Embodied AI

Elorian; Iowa; On-site; USD 120,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Elorian, a pioneering AI lab, seeks researchers and engineers with robotics expertise to infuse physical-world priors into foundation-scale models. You will advance robotics perception, planning, and multimodal data solutions, collaborating with a core team to tackle real-world challenges and deploy foundational AI across robotics applications.

You will design and evaluate visual reasoning, 3D spatial understanding, and data pipelines, bridging model capabilities with practical robotics use

Qualifications

• Strong robotics background (research or engineering) with perception, planning or control experience.
• Interest in applying robotics domain knowledge to large-scale multimodal AI.
• Experience with modern ML, LLMs, or multimodal architectures.
• Demonstrated problem-solving and independent research abilities.

Responsibilities

• Develop visual and spatial reasoning within multimodal foundation models for robotics.
• Architect scalable robotics data pipelines including collection, annotation, and evaluation.
• Explore embodied reasoning and decision-making powered by Vision-Language-Action architectures.
• Collaborate with foundation model researchers and robotics partners on real-world bottlenecks.

Skills

Robotics expertise

Machine Learning

Multimodal models

Vision-Language-Action

Tools

Isaac Sim

MuJoCo

LLMs

VLMs

Job description

About Us

We are a well-funded, early-stage AI lab focused on building the next generation of frontier multimodal AI models. Founded by former DeepMind researchers, including Andrew Dai, who was previously a leader on Gemini. Our team currently consists of 20 world-class scientists and engineers. We raised $55M in seed funding from Striker Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Altimeter Capital, and NVIDIA. We are tackling some of the hardest problems in artificial intelligence, and we are growing fast.

About the Role

As a foundation model company, Elorian aims to empower robotics developers through advanced visual reasoning, spatial understanding, and high-quality robotics data solutions. We are looking for researchers and engineers with a background in robotics who want to apply their domain expertise to foundation-scale AI. Instead of focusing solely on isolated robot hardware or narrow policies, you will collaborate closely with our core foundation model research team to infuse physical-world priors into our models, address real-world robotics challenges, and develop foundational capabilities that generalize across a broad spectrum of robotics applications.

What You Will Do

• Develop Visual & Spatial Intelligence for Robotics: Advance and evaluate visual reasoning, 3D spatial understanding, and physical affordance capabilities directly within our multimodal foundation models to support downstream robotic perception and control.

• Architect Robotics Data Pipelines: Design scalable data pipelines—including data collection, teleoperation and trajectory annotation, automated quality assessment, and evaluation frameworks for multi-modal robotic data.

• Explore Foundation-Driven Embodied Reasoning: Investigate and implement novel approaches to robotic task planning, hierarchical reasoning, and decision-making powered by multimodal foundation models and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) architectures.

• Bridge Foundation Models & Robotics Applications: Collaborate closely with core foundation model researchers and robotics partners to identify real-world bottlenecks, evaluate model capabilities, and build impactful foundational AI solutions for the robotics ecosystem.

What We Are Looking For

• Strong background in robotics (research or engineering), with first-hand experience in robotic perception, planning, control, or robot learning.

• Genuine excitement to transition robotics domain knowledge into large-scale deep learning, multimodal architectures, and foundation model research.

• Solid experience with machine learning and hands-on familiarity with modern LLMs, multimodal foundation models (VLMs), or transformer architectures.

• Strong research and problem-solving skills, with the ability to independently investigate open-ended, complex technical challenges.

Nice to Have

• Experience with robotics simulation environments (e.g., Isaac Sim, MuJoCo) for large-scale data generation, policy evaluation, or model pre-training.

• Experience with robotics datasets, trajectory annotation, task decomposition, and benchmark evaluation for physical systems.

• Experience applying, fine-tuning, or developing LLMs, VLMs, or Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for robotics problems.

• Background working with real-world robotic systems (manipulation, navigation, or autonomous agents) and understanding the practical limits of deploying policies to physical hardware.

• Deep expertise in robotic planning, 3D spatial reasoning, affordance modeling, or embodied intelligence.