Robot Learning Engineer: Imitation & Manipulation Equity

Defexrobotics; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Defexrobotics is pursuing research on teaching robots assembly tasks from demonstrations and measurements. We’ll build policies and experiments to determine where learning helps the prototype and how to handle a different connector.

You will work across data collection, training and robot deployment with the founders and controls engineer; the first task is connector insertion, judged by the tested joint, recovery behavior and human intervention required.

Qualifications

• Trained a policy and tested it on a physical robot with analysis of failures.
• Ability to implement training/evaluation code in Python using PyTorch or JAX.
• Experience with imitation or reinforcement learning and data collection impact.
• Understanding of robot observations, actions and timing; debugging capabilities.
• Design experiments to separate model improvements from hardware changes.

Responsibilities

• Build demonstration and intervention tools recording synchronized data.
• Develop imitation-learning policies and explore RL for observed failures.
• Deploy models on the prototype, considering calibration and latency.
• Version datasets and checkpoints; create tooling to replay experiments.
• Evaluate policies against conventional control on test parts; analyze failures.
• Adapt approach to a second connector; measure additional demonstrations and effort.

Skills

Policy training

Python

PyTorch/JAX

Imitation Learning

Reinforcement Learning

Data collection

Robot debugging

Experiment design

Tools

C++

ROS 2

Edge Inference

Job description

Defexrobotics is pursuing research on teaching robots assembly tasks from demonstrations and measurements. We’ll build policies and experiments to determine where learning helps the prototype and how to handle a different connector.

You will work across data collection, training and robot deployment with the founders and controls engineer; the first task is connector insertion, judged by the tested joint, recovery behavior and human intervention required.