Robotics ML Research Scientist — Physical Assembly

Tri; Los Altos (CA); On-site; USD 176,000 - 253,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k)

Paid time off

Annual bonus

Job summary

Toyota Research Institute (TRI) is seeking a Research Scientist to join the Future Factory team in TRI's Energy and Materials division to build intelligent systems for physical assembly.

You will design learning pipelines from scratch, run experiments, and explore LLMs and agentic infrastructure, collaborating with TRI researchers and Toyota manufacturing partners. This role is ideal for a recent PhD with a practical implementation track record and a keen curiosity about how things are made.

Qualifications

• PhD in a relevant field completed recently (or nearing completion).
• Experience building pipelines and components from scratch.
• Hands-on policy learning, RL, or robot learning experience.
• Proficiency in Python across data processing to evaluation.
• Genuine interest in how physical products are designed and manufactured.
• Familiarity with LLMs or agentic AI frameworks for structured reasoning.
• Experience with robot manipulation, motion planning, or sim-to-real transfer.
• Exposure to manufacturing processes or CAD/CAM toolchains.
• Experience contributing to production-level research codebases.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement end-to-end modeling pipelines for machine assembly tasks, building from ground up.
• Run systematic experiments to evaluate architectural variants and data strategies.
• Develop evaluation protocols to measure policy performance across assembly scenarios.
• Explore integration of modern LLMs and agentic systems for planning in assembly.
• Collaborate with researchers and engineers across TRI and Toyota to connect learning with hardware.
• Contribute to writing and publishing research results in peer-reviewed venues.

Skills

PhD in CS/Robotics/ME

Python

Reinforcement learning

Robot manipulation

Sim-to-real transfer

LLMs / agentic AI

Production codebases

Policy learning

Education

PhD in CS/Robotics/ME

Tools

CAD/CAM tools

Job description

Toyota Research Institute (TRI) is seeking a Research Scientist to join the Future Factory team in TRI's Energy and Materials division to build intelligent systems for physical assembly.

You will design learning pipelines from scratch, run experiments, and explore LLMs and agentic infrastructure, collaborating with TRI researchers and Toyota manufacturing partners. This role is ideal for a recent PhD with a practical implementation track record and a keen curiosity about how things are made.