Robotics Engineer: Deploy & Validate Real Hardware Policies

Workman Labs; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 270,000 - 370,000; Full time

Job summary

Runway in New York is seeking a Member of Technical Staff, Robotics Engineer to connect world models to physical robots and extend the company's simulation capabilities to real hardware.

You will own the deployment loop for learned policies on real robot arms, diagnose failures, and help design data collection and evaluation protocols while collaborating with research to improve policy success.

Qualifications

• Deployment of software on real robot hardware and iteration to fix issues on physical robots.
• Fluency in action/command spaces, control frequencies, and observation pipelines.
• Ability to reconfigure a robot workspace and trace policy failures quickly.

Responsibilities

• Own the deployment loop for learned policies (VLAs, diffusion policies, World Action Models) on real robot arms: inference serving, action decoding, controller integration, latency budgets, and safety limits
• Diagnose real-world policy failures - determining whether the problem is data coverage, camera/proprioception mismatch, or execution - and fix at the right layer with research
• Design demonstration data collection protocols (task setup, camera placement, teleop conventions) to teach world models effectively
• Partner with research to run controlled experiments linking world model representations, data composition, and fine-tuning to physical success rates
• Define and run physical evaluation protocols so results are trustworthy and comparable across policy iterations
• Adapt policy recipes to partner hardware and new embodiments

Skills

Real robot deployment

Software-to-robot interface

Policy deployment experience

Hardware-in-loop troubleshooting

Job description

Runway in New York is seeking a Member of Technical Staff, Robotics Engineer to connect world models to physical robots and extend the company's simulation capabilities to real hardware.

You will own the deployment loop for learned policies on real robot arms, diagnose failures, and help design data collection and evaluation protocols while collaborating with research to improve policy success.