Robotics Research Engineer

About the role

We are reimagining manufacturing through advanced robotics. Our mission is to rebuild the American manufacturing industry as an AI-first, assembly-focused, dual-use contract manufacturer. We aim to empower manufacturers with intelligent, efficient, and adaptable robotic systems that redefine productivity and quality. As a founding member of our engineering team, you will have a direct and significant impact on our product, culture, and ultimate success. This role is 100% in-person at our office in the mission, SF. We are hiring a Robotics Research Engineer to design, implement, and deploy intelligent robotic systems for manufacturing. This is not a purely academic role - and not a generic software role. You will work across: ROS2-based system architecture Manipulation and navigation Perception and VLA-based control Traditional controls fused with learned methods On-site deployment in production manufacturing workcells You should be equally comfortable reading robotics papers, tuning controllers, debugging sensor calibration, and pushing production code to robots running on a factory floor.

Responsibilities

• Robotics Systems & Architecture
• Design and implement distributed robotic systems in ROS2
• Build modular autonomy stacks for manipulation and mobile platforms
• Own system-level performance, latency, and reliability
• Robotics Foundation Models (VLA)
• Develop and integrate Vision-Language-Action models for robotic control
• Design data collection pipelines and fine-tune foundation models for assembly tasks
• Benchmark and evaluate real-world performance
• Controls + Learning
• Fuse traditional control with learned policies
• Implement hybrid perception-planning-control architectures
• Improve robustness, repeatability, and safety in physical systems
• Manipulation, Navigation & Deployment
• Develop algorithms for dexterous manipulation and industrial navigation
• Ship systems from prototype to production
• Debug real-world edge cases (lighting, calibration drift, wear, latency) and maintain deployed robotic cells

Requirements

• Deployment Mentality
• Experience shipping systems into real environments (not just lab demos)
• Comfort debugging hardware-software integration issues
• Ability to own systems end-to-end
• Ownership
• Thrives in high-velocity, ambiguous environments
• Takes full technical ownership of complex systems
• Willing to get into the weeds of mechanical, electrical, and software challenges
• PhD in Robotics or related field
• Experience working on dual-use or DoD-related systems
• Ability to obtain a government security clearance
• Experience with safety-critical robotic systems
• Growth Opportunities
• Define the technical direction of robotics foundation model deployment in manufacturing
• Build and lead the autonomy team
• Shape the next generation of AI-driven assembly systems
• Become a core technical interface with defense and industrial partners
• Why Join Us?
• This is one of the only places where world-class manufacturing operators, mechanical engineers, robotics researchers, and software engineers sit in the same room - building production systems together.
• We are committed to being deeply embedded in the U.S. industrial base. Our focus is simple: build adaptive robotic assembly systems that make American manufacturing scalable, resilient, and competitive again.
• If you want to publish papers, this may not be the role.
• If you want to build and deploy the systems those papers were meant to enable - this is it.
• The base salary range for this full-time position in the location of San Francisco is:
• $150,000-$250,000 USD

Benefits

Additional Information

Robotics Research Engineer

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Company Intel

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