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Sentient Machines

robotics research · reinforcement learning

Member of Technical Staff — Robotics (Reinforcement Learning)

San Francisco Bay Area · OnsitePosted 7 days ago
HardwareStaff+Full Time
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Member of Technical Staff — Robotics (Reinforcement Learning)

San Francisco

Core Team

In office

Full-time

About the Role

We are looking for an engineer who will own the full locomotion and whole-body control stack for our humanoid robot. Your work will directly shape the robot’s ability to walk, balance, and move safely and smoothly in the real world.

This is a highly hands-on role. You will spend your time building training pipelines in simulation, iterating on RL and IL policies, transferring them to hardware, and debugging behavior on real robots.

What You’ll Do

  • Develop, train, and evaluate RL and IL policies for whole-body control and locomotion.

  • Build and optimize training pipelines in Isaac Lab and real-time inference pipelines on robot hardware.

  • Drive sim-to-real transfer, including domain randomization, curriculum design, and iterative policy refinement.

  • Work directly with hardware to diagnose failures, tune controllers, gather datasets, and improve stability and performance.

  • Own experiments end-to-end: from idea → prototype → simulation → real robot deployment.

  • Collaborate on motion, control, perception, and high-level planning systems as we scale capabilities.

Ideal Background

We’re looking for someone who is both a strong RL engineer and a practical roboticist—someone who enjoys seeing their work running on a real machine, not just in a paper or a simulation.

You likely have experience in:

  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Isaac Lab, Isaac Gym, MuJoCo, or similar physics simulators.
  • Building training pipelines with PyTorch.
  • Deploying policies on embedded or GPU-accelerated systems (C++/Python/JAX/etc).
  • Whole-body control, locomotion control, or quadruped/humanoid robotics.
  • Working with real robots — debugging hardware, evaluating behavior, collecting rollouts.

Bonus experience (not required):

  • Unitree or similar humanoid/quadruped platforms.
  • ACT, Diffusion Policy, GR00T, or other imitation learning methods.
  • Motion planning, model predictive control, or low-level torque control.

Who Thrives Here

You're a great fit if you:

  • Prefer real results over academic elegance.
  • Love tuning, tweaking, and iterating rapidly.
  • Are excited to push a robot until it breaks—and then fix it.
  • Are comfortable owning a large scope and moving fast with incomplete information.
  • Get deep satisfaction from seeing something you built controlling a physical system.

This role is not a fit if you primarily want to publish papers, or work in large slow-moving orgs..

What This Role Offers

  • Significant ownership over a foundational part of the robot’s capabilities.
  • The ability to ship work directly to hardware from day one.
  • A seat on the ground floor of an ambitious robotics team.
  • Fast iteration cycles, huge autonomy, and the chance to define core technical systems.

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Req ID: R1