Staff Reinforcement Learning Research Engineer

Boston Dynamics, Inc.; Waltham (MA); On-site; USD 155,284 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k)

Paid time off

Annual bonus structure

Job summary

Boston Dynamics, Inc. is seeking a Staff RL Research Engineer to spearhead the reinforcement learning stack. The role involves implementing advanced algorithms, scaling simulations, and ensuring reliable deployment on robots.

The ideal candidate should hold an MS or PhD with significant experience in ML and Robotics, and proficiency with RL toolboxes. The position offers a competitive salary range between $155,284.34 and $200,000, along with comprehensive benefits including medical and paid time off.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience or a PhD in ML, Robotics, or a related field.
• Deployed policies on physical robots focusing on latency and safety.
• Expertise with RL toolboxes like RSL-RL, CleanRL, and Stable Baselines.

Responsibilities

• Implement on-policy and off-policy learning algorithms.
• Scale GPU-accelerated simulation to generate millions of samples.
• Integrate RL with VLAs for fine-tuning multimodal policies.

Skills

Reinforcement Learning

Robotics

Machine Learning

GPU-accelerated Computing

Software Infrastructure

Simulation and Rendering

Education

MS in ML, Robotics, or related field

PhD in ML, Robotics, or related field

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

Docker

Kubernetes

ONNX

Job description

Do you want to build the scalable reinforcement learning framework that powers the next generation of humanoid and quadruped robots? As a Staff RL Research Engineer, you'll own the RL stack, including massively parallel simulation, domain randomization, policy optimization, and on-robot deployment. Your job is to make the pipeline fast, reliable, and reproducible. You'll work alongside world-class engineers and scientists pushing the boundaries of whole-body control and dexterous manipulation.

In this role, you will:

• Implement on-policy and off-policy learning algorithms
• Scale GPU-accelerated simulation to generate millions of samples per second
• Crack sim-to-real to produce policies that transfer to the physical robot
• Integrate RL with VLAs to fine-tune and distill large multimodal policies
• Make deployment easy, fast, and reproducible
• Build visualization tools that enable data-driven research

Required Qualifications

• MS with 3+ years of experience, or PhD, in ML, Robotics, or a related field
• Deployed policies on physical robots with attention to latency, robustness, and safety
• Expertise with RL toolboxes (RSL-RL, CleanRL, RLlib, Stable Baselines)
• Expertise with simulation and rendering tooling (Isaac Lab, MuJoCo, MjWarp, MjLab)
• Proficient in PyTorch and/or JAX, plus inference runtimes (ONNX, Triton, TensorRT)
• Solid software fundamentals: Bazel, monorepos, Docker, CI/CD

The ideal candidate has:

• Built production-grade RL training pipelines
• Deep knowledge of GPU-accelerated physics simulation
• Applied RL to humanoid locomotion, whole-body control, or dexterous manipulation
• Worked on sim-to-real transfer, domain randomization, or system identification
• Experience with heterogeneous compute clusters and Kubernetes

Why join us?

Ownership of the company wide RL tools powering all of our robots

Direct access to the compute infrastructure to run large-scale experiments

The chance to help define what’s possible in real-world robotics

Compensation & Benefits

The salary or hourly pay range for this position will be clearly stated in the job posting as required by Massachusetts law. The base pay range for this position is between $155,284.34- $200,000. Base pay will depend on multiple individualized factors including, but not limited to internal equity, job related knowledge, skills and experience. This range represents a good faith estimate of compensation at the time of posting.

Boston Dynamics offers a generous Benefits package including medical, dental vision, 401(k), paid time off and an annual bonus structure. Additional details regarding these benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer for employment.

We are growing rapidly, building a commercial company that delivers cutting edge technology and solutions to our customers from industrial applications to logistics and warehouse solutions.