Robotics Research Engineer - Data-Driven Physical AI

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

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health, dental, vision benefits

PTO

Flexible work schedule

Job summary

Abaka AI in Silicon Valley is seeking a Robotics Research Engineer to advance the data foundation for physical AI. You will train and evaluate robot policies on real hardware and in simulation, building scalable pipelines from sensor data to high-quality training sets.

You will publish findings at top venues and contribute to our in-house Abaka Robotics Lab, working with 6-DoF arms and teleoperation platforms. A strong ML and robotics background is essential, with hands-on hardware experience.

Qualifications

• MS or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a 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.

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.
• 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.

Skills

Robotics fundamentals

Machine learning fundamentals

Evaluation methodology

Hands-on robotics experience

Education

MS/PhD in Robotics/CS/ML or related field

Tools

COLMAP

SLAM

MuJoCo

Isaac Sim

SAPIEN

Job description

Abaka AI in Silicon Valley is seeking a Robotics Research Engineer to advance the data foundation for physical AI. You will train and evaluate robot policies on real hardware and in simulation, building scalable pipelines from sensor data to high-quality training sets.

You will publish findings at top venues and contribute to our in-house Abaka Robotics Lab, working with 6-DoF arms and teleoperation platforms. A strong ML and robotics background is essential, with hands-on hardware experience.