Senior Robotics Research Scientist: AI & Robot Learning

Toyota Research Institute; Cambridge (MA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 259,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) eligibility

Paid time off and parental leave

Job summary

Toyota Research Institute (TRI) is seeking a driven researcher to advance robotics and machine learning, focusing on state-of-the-art robotics and general-purpose robot foundation models. You will develop scalable ML pipelines, work with embodied data, and contribute to open-source software and publications.

This role involves collaboration with academic labs and industry partners to push the boundaries of AI-powered robots, with opportunities to publish impactful research and deploy in

Qualifications

• PhD in computer science, machine learning, robotics, or closely related field.
• Experience training large models and deploying them on embodied systems, particularly toward robotic manipulation.
• Strong software development skills in Python, familiarity with mixed C++/Python codebases, and clean, maintainable code.
• Extensive practical experience with ML using frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow, including data pipelines, model serving, and cloud training.
• Familiarity with state-of-the-art robot learning methods (diffusion policies, flow matching, RL, world models).
• Experience with robots and system integration in research and deployment on hardware.

Responsibilities

• Work as part of a dynamic, closely-knit research team building useful robots and general-purpose robot foundation models.
• Implement, extend, and create state-of-the-art methods for robot behavior learning from interactive embodied data and online sources.
• Design and implement high-performance machine-learning pipelines and optimize data and learning stacks for scalability and performance.
• Be a key member of the team and drive rapid progress through internal capabilities and high-impact publications.
• Collaborate with internal scientists and partner labs at top universities to drive pioneering research at scale.

Skills

Python programming

C++/Python

Machine Learning

Robotics

Publication track record

Education

PhD in computer science, ML, robotics, or related field

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

ROS 2

Job description

Toyota Research Institute (TRI) is seeking a driven researcher to advance robotics and machine learning, focusing on state-of-the-art robotics and general-purpose robot foundation models. You will develop scalable ML pipelines, work with embodied data, and contribute to open-source software and publications.

This role involves collaboration with academic labs and industry partners to push the boundaries of AI-powered robots, with opportunities to publish impactful research and deploy in