Founding Robotics Research Engineer

Company Description

Onyx is a robotics AI controls and simulation company building the tooling and infrastructure to push hardware performance to its limits with learning. We are assembling a team of researchers like Google Deepmind/Boston Dynamics, but extending our research into tools that benefit all of the world's hardware research challenges. Concretely, we will push the frontier of research by building hardware with legs, wheels, and propellers, and then convert our R&D into software releases of tooling that any company can use to advance their own controls/simulation performance.

If you love robotics, controls, and research but wish you could see meaningful real-world impact every day of work, this is a team for you. We are bringing together a tight-knit team of people just like us to build a new controls stack for humanity's most ambitious and meaningful physical technologies.

Role Description

You will be one of the first hires as a Founding Research Engineer , joining our team on-site in Boston, MA. This is an opportunity to become a leader in robotics, whether that's becoming more involved with research in this field, or becoming an engineering org leader as we scale. What matters most is that you care about our vision and are willing to work hard with us as we work directly with customers.

On a day-to-day basis, your primary focus will be rolling up your sleeves to engineer critical solutions for internal research as well as building solutions for the research goals of our customers. Our customers are primarily controls research teams in robotics, automotive, aerospace/space, energy, manufacturing, among other industries. You may spend ~50% of your time engineering with these external research teams to close a feedback loop on what Onyx should be building internally. The rest of your time may be spent on internal research engineering for ambitious research demos we will use to attract public attention.

It's going to be a lot of fun working alongside the most talented and motivated people in our space. As the founder and CEO, I want you to join us in building a team that becomes the world's pillar of robotics controls.

In This Role You Will:

• Engineer state-of-the-art algorithms in robotics for AI controls and simulation, including: neural network dynamics modeling and system identification, sim-to-real and parallel simulation, reinforcement learning, diffusion and flow matching policies, MPC/MPPI, and embedded real-time control using AI models.
• Turn our research into user-facing product for hardware research.
• Develop backend infrastructure for controls/hardware data and AI model training.
• Work closely with external controls engineering teams who are using our tooling for a variety of real-world applications.
• Design and engineer exciting research demos/papers using our tooling and custom-built hardware to publicly show the world what Onyx is capable of.
• Be a part of shaping our team, culture, and bringing together talented people to work alongside.

What We Hope You'll Bring:

• Strong demonstrated background in robotics. P ortfolios of work are highly encouraged, there are no specific degree requirements. We primarily want to see that you like working on hard problems.
• People skills to work directly with customers and build engineering solutions with them.
• Use of AI coding tools like Claude and Codex, ability to build automations to repeated problems and incorporate Onyx's company data into engineering workflows.
• General knowledge of hardware systems and modern robotics research.
• Initiative - ready to lead/own core technology, make decisions, and learn new skills quickly.

Bonus

• Mechanical understanding of hardware systems.
• Experience in training AI models, interest in AI training tooling/infrastructure.
• Experience in control theory, dynamics modeling, system identification, sim-to-real, simulation, model-based control, and reinforcement learning.

Requirements:

• You are able to work in-person in Boston, MA, USA as a primary workplace. Any of us may work from home as needed, but in the interest of building a tight-knit cohesive team, we will primarily be working in-person together!