Robotics Research Engineer - Data-Driven, Flexible Schedule

ABAKA; Mountain View, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 100,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health, dental, vision

Flexible work schedule

Job summary

Abaka AI is seeking a Robotics Research Engineer to join Abaka Robotics Lab, focusing on building the data foundation for physical AI. You will train and evaluate robot policies, design scalable data pipelines, and contribute to publications in robotics, vision, and ML venues.

The role involves working with 6-DoF collaborative robot arms and an ALOHA-style bimanual platform, translating results into high-quality training datasets with minimal human labeling.

Qualifications

• MS or PhD in Robotics, CS, ML, or related field.
• 1–3 years of hands-on experience with real robot hardware, through research, an internship, or a project.
• Strong machine learning fundamentals: optimization, generalization, evaluation methodology, and end-to-end model training.
• Strong robotics fundamentals: coordinate frames, kinematics, basic control.
• Rigor in evaluation: claims about a policy or a dataset are backed by measurements.
• Publications or workshop papers at top robotics, vision, or ML venues.
• Experience with imitation learning or VLA codebases such as LeRobot, ACT, Diffusion Policy, OpenVLA, or π0.
• Experience deploying a learned policy on a real robot and running a rigorous evaluation.
• Practical 3D reconstruction experience: COLMAP, SLAM, 3DGS/NeRF, point-cloud registration.
• World models or video generative models, particularly as simulators or data generators.
• RL fine-tuning of learned policies, or model-based RL.
• Hand and object pose estimation, hand-object interaction, or human-to-robot motion retargeting.

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 the papers that matter, run current methods on our hardware, and develop findings that hold up into publications at top robotics, vision, or ML venues.
• Maintain the training and evaluation infrastructure: training runs, evaluation harnesses, and the simulation or world-model environments used ahead of hardware tests.
• Scope 2: Data Pipeline: Synthesis, Annotation, Curation
• Design pipelines that turn raw capture into training data with minimal human labeling: synthesize what was not captured, auto-label with models and geometry, and curate what goes into training.
• Track which data decisions changed policy performance.

Skills

Robotics fundamentals

Machine learning fundamentals

Hands-on robot hardware

Evaluation methodology

Coordinate frames

Education

MS or PhD in Robotics, CS or ML

Tools

COLMAP

MuJoCo

SLAM

NeRF

Job description

Abaka AI is seeking a Robotics Research Engineer to join Abaka Robotics Lab, focusing on building the data foundation for physical AI. You will train and evaluate robot policies, design scalable data pipelines, and contribute to publications in robotics, vision, and ML venues.

The role involves working with 6-DoF collaborative robot arms and an ALOHA-style bimanual platform, translating results into high-quality training datasets with minimal human labeling.