Staff Robotics Research Engineer: Perception & Foundation Models

Industrial Next (YC W22); San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive base salary

Equity included

Relocation support

Medical, dental, and vision coverage

Job summary

IndustrialNext, based in San Francisco, is building autonomous factories with state-of-the-art perception and foundation-model driven robotics. As a Member of Technical Staff, Research, you will advance perception models, data pipelines, and scalable training workflows for real-world robots deployed in manufacturing.

You will collaborate across hardware and software, train on real and simulated data, and lead efforts from model design to deployment, ensuring high-precision manipulation and

Qualifications

• BS in CS / CSE or equivalent; MS/PhD in robotics/AI focusing on manipulation preferred.
• 3+ years combined graduate and professional experience in manipulation-focused AI (perception, IL/RL, foundation models).
• Fluency with vision/models; experience with Imitation Learning and Reinforcement Learning; discuss architecture and training.

Responsibilities

• Build perception models, foundation models, and policies for dexterous manipulation.
• Train and validate across handheld data, simulation, and real-robot deployment.
• Build infrastructure for large-scale data collection, model training and deployment.
• Drive sim-first workflow and self-improving learning on real cells.

Skills

Manipulation AI experience

Vision model proficiency

Reinforcement learning basics

Data pipeline development

Hands-on robotics experience

Education

BS in CS / CSE

MS or PhD in robotics or AI focused on manipulation

Tools

Simulation tools (MuJoCo, IsaacSim)

TensorFlow/PyTorch

C++/Python

Job description

IndustrialNext, based in San Francisco, is building autonomous factories with state-of-the-art perception and foundation-model driven robotics. As a Member of Technical Staff, Research, you will advance perception models, data pipelines, and scalable training workflows for real-world robots deployed in manufacturing.

You will collaborate across hardware and software, train on real and simulated data, and lead efforts from model design to deployment, ensuring high-precision manipulation and