Research Scientist Intern, Humanoid Control & Dexterous Manipulation (PhD)

Meta; Redmond (WA); On-site; USD 55,000 - 83,000; Full time

Job summary

Meta Reality Labs Research seeks a Research Scientist Intern to advance loco-manipulation and dexterous hand control policies. You will work across data collection, algorithm development, and hardware deployment with a cross-disciplinary team.

Internships run 12–24 weeks with multiple start dates. You will design, test, and refine research ideas, contribute to conferences, and share code that advances robotics and AI integration in real hardware.

Qualifications

• Currently pursuing or holding a Ph.D. in robotics, ML, or related STEM field.
• Experience with physics-based animation or robotics research is a plus.
• Strong programming with Python/PyTorch and/or C/C++.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and analyze novel ideas for robotic loco-manipulation and dexterous control.
• Deploy and test algorithms on real robots for sim-to-real transfer.
• Collaborate with researchers and engineers; publish results and release code.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

C/C++

Reinforcement learning

Imitation learning

Robotic simulation

Open-source contributions

Education

Ph.D. in robotics / ML

Tools

Open-source tools

Job description

Meta Reality Labs Research is a team of researchers and engineers pushing the frontier of AI, robotics, and AR/VR technology. Within RL Research, our team is building the next generation of full body loco-manipulation and dexterous hands control policies. We are seeking a Research Scientist Intern to help take novel ideas all the way from inception to real hardware.

Interns in this role may work across the full robotics stack: data collection and processing, algorithm development and model training, and eventually running the algorithm on real robots. It involves working with research scientists and engineers together as a team, fast prototyping and rapid iterations of ideas, and debugging algorithms on real hardware.

Our internships are twelve (12) to twenty-four (24) weeks long and we have various start dates throughout the year.

Responsibilities

• Independently design, develop, and analyze novel research ideas related to robotic simulation and control, with a focus on loco-manipulation and dexterous manipulation.
• Deploy, test, and debug algorithms on real robots for sim-to-real transfer.
• Collaborate with other researchers and engineers across multiple disciplines.
• Communication of research agenda, progress and results to a diverse audience regularly.
• Publish research results at top conferences and release code that contributes to the field of robotics.

Minimum qualifications

• Currently has or is in the process of obtaining a Ph.D. degree in robotics, computer graphics, computer vision, machine learning, or a related STEM field
• Experience with physics-based character animation, reinforcement learning and imitation learning, human motion synthesis and retargeting, forward and inverse kinematics and dynamics, numerical optimization
• Interpersonal experience: cross-group and cross-culture collaboration
• 1+ years of experience with any of Python/pytorch or C/C++, and developing interactive graphics applications
• Must obtain work authorization in country of employment at the time of hire and maintain ongoing work authorization during employment

Preferred qualifications

• Intent to return to degree program after the completion of the internship/co-op
• 2+ years experience with physical-base character animation and simulation and imitation learning
• Proven track record of achieving results as demonstrated in accepted papers at top conference and journal venues such as RSS, ICRA, IROS, CoRL, SIGGRAPH/Asia/TOG, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML etc
• Experience in contributing to open-source projects
• Experience in sim-to-real transfer and deploying simulated policies onto real robot hardware
• Experience with perception algorithms such as SLAM and pose estimation
• Experience working with tactile sensors