Robotics Research Engineer — Data-Driven AI Lab (Equity, PTO)

ABAKA; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 100,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health benefits

Paid time off (PTO)

Flexible work schedule

Job summary

Abaka AI is seeking a Robotics Research Engineer to join Abaka Robotics Lab, building data foundations for physical AI. You will train and evaluate policies on simulated and real robots, and design scalable pipelines turning raw sensor data into high-quality training datasets with minimal human labeling.

The role blends robot learning, data production, and publishable research, with access to 6-DoF robot arms and teleoperation platforms, contributing to datasets for partners and potential

Qualifications

• MS or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, ML, or a related field.
• 1-3 years of hands-on experience with real robot hardware through research or internship.
• Strong machine learning fundamentals: optimization, generalization, evaluation methodology, and end-to-end model training.
• Strong robotics fundamentals: coordinate frames, kinematics, basic control.
• Strong 3D vision fundamentals: camera models, multi-view geometry, point clouds.
• Rigor in evaluation: claims backed by measurements.

Responsibilities

• Train and evaluate robot policies (imitation learning, diffusion policies, VLA, RL fine-tuning) on our data and public baselines, in simulation and on real robots.
• Turn evaluation results into a quality signal for the data: which data helped, which did not, and why.
• Track the state of the art: reproduce papers, run current methods on our hardware, and develop publishable findings.
• Maintain the training and evaluation infrastructure: training runs, evaluation harnesses, and the simulation/world-model environments used ahead of hardware tests.
• Design pipelines that turn raw capture into training data with minimal human labeling; auto-label with models and geometry, curate training data.

Skills

Strong machine learning fundamentals

Strong robotics fundamentals

Strong 3D vision fundamentals

Rigor in evaluation

Education

MS or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, ML, or related field

Tools

COLMAP

SLAM

3DGS/NeRF

Point-cloud registration

Job description

Abaka AI is seeking a Robotics Research Engineer to join Abaka Robotics Lab, building data foundations for physical AI. You will train and evaluate policies on simulated and real robots, and design scalable pipelines turning raw sensor data into high-quality training datasets with minimal human labeling.

The role blends robot learning, data production, and publishable research, with access to 6-DoF robot arms and teleoperation platforms, contributing to datasets for partners and potential