Robotics Researcher

Energize Group; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Energize Group is assembling an early robotics AI team in Boston to turn research-grade RL, MPC, and simulation into scalable tools for mission-critical hardware across automotive, aerospace, defence, and industrial sectors.

You will own core technology from day one, with ~60–70% hands-on research and engineering and 30–40% collaboration with customer engineering teams. This role demands breadth across controls theory, simulation, RL, and agentic tooling.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated breadth across controls theory, simulation, RL and agentic tooling.
• Strong personal drive and ability to work in an early-stage environment.
• A portfolio showing sustained, shipped work across months, not tutorials.

Responsibilities

• Engineering controls and simulation algorithms from scratch across RL, MPC, MPPI, sim to real, and physics simulation
• Building AI model training infrastructure for hardware data and controls applications
• Working directly with customer controls engineering teams across automotive, aerospace, defence, and manufacturing
• Designing and running research demos using Onyx tooling and custom built hardware
• Using LLM and agent based tooling including Claude as a core part of your engineering workflow
• Helping shape the team, culture, and technical direction as one of the founding engineers

Skills

Breadth across controls & simulation

Hands-on research & engineering

Education

MIT/Stanford/CMU background

Tools

Onyx tooling

Custom hardware

Job description

Founding Robotics Research Engineer - Early Stage Robotics Company

Full Time, On Site

We are partnering exclusively with the founder of a preseed funded, early stage Boston robotics AI company making its first engineering hires. The company is building AI controls and simulation tooling for mission critical hardware across automotive, aerospace, defence, and industrial applications. The model is straightforward: take research grade algorithms in reinforcement learning, MPC, and sim to real that would typically stay inside a lab, and turn them into real tools that hardware engineering teams across industry can rely on. Named enterprise customers are already in place.

About the Role

The Role is one of the first few people in, you will have genuine ownership of core technology from day one. This is not a role where you execute someone else's roadmap. You will be shaping what gets built alongside the founder and the existing team. Roughly 60 to 70 percent of your time will be hands on research and engineering across the full controls and simulation stack. The remaining 30 to 40 percent will be working directly alongside customer engineering teams. The expectation is someone with genuine breadth, someone who can move across controls theory, simulation, RL, and agentic tooling rather than being narrowly specialized in a single area.

Responsibilities

• Engineering controls and simulation algorithms from scratch across RL, MPC, MPPI, sim to real, and physics simulation
• Building AI model training infrastructure for hardware data and controls applications
• Working directly with customer controls engineering teams across automotive, aerospace, defence, and manufacturing
• Designing and running research demos using Onyx tooling and custom built hardware
• Using LLM and agent based tooling including Claude as a core part of your engineering workflow
• Helping shape the team, culture, and technical direction as one of the founding engineers

Qualifications

• Experience at a frontier lab or company in industry: Boston Dynamics, RAI Institute, TRI, DeepMind, Physical Intelligence, Figure AI, 1X, Skild AI, Apptronik, IHMC, or similar
• OR a strong academic background from a notable programme such as MIT, Stanford, or CMU as a supporting signal alongside the above

Required Skills

• A strong portfolio or GitHub showing real depth and difficulty. Projects that took months of sustained effort to ship, not tutorials or course projects
• Beyond credentials; Genuine personal drive and ambition, someone who is mission driven and will ride through the ups and downs of an early stage company
• Breadth across the controls and simulation stack rather than narrow specialization in a single area
• Comfort working directly with customers and communicating complex technical ideas clearly
• A scrappy zero to one builder mindset, someone who moves fast and figures things out