Research Scientist Intern, Robot Foundation Models (PhD)

Agios is a full stack research organization within Reality Labs Research, spanning materials and manufacturing, sensors and actuators, simulation, and learned control. Our mission is to build systems that enhance human capabilities through intelligent machine collaboration. Today that work centers on what we call the last bottleneck: AI has compressed the digital side of research and development, while the physical side still moves at human speed. Dexterous Manipulation is the pillar attacking that problem directly, pairing a custom dexterous robotic hand with in-house wearable sensing, high accuracy simulation, and glove-driven teleoperation.As a Research Scientist Intern, you will work at the intersection of robot learning, dexterous control, and human-to-robot transfer, with mentors who span hardware, simulation, controls, and policy learning. Your focus will be learned models that turn human demonstration data into executable robot behavior, covering retargeting, manipulation policies, and teleoperation.Our internships are twelve (12) to twenty-four (24) weeks long and we have various start dates throughout the year.

Research Scientist Intern, Robot Foundation Models (PhD) Responsibilities:

• Drive an independent research thread on learned control and motion transfer for dexterous hands, from problem formulation through real robot or high fidelity simulation evaluation.
• Build training pipelines for modern policy classes, including flow matching and diffusion policies, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, large behavior models, and VLAs.
• Develop representations that fuse multimodal human and robot data, including video, hand pose, tactile and contact force, and IMU, into a shared action space.
• Construct data collection pipelines and benchmarks for dexterous manipulation, including held-out and out-of-distribution protocols that test generalization across objects, motions, and embodiments.
• Collaborate across an interdisciplinary team of hardware, simulation, controls, and policy researchers, and communicate research plans, progress, and results.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Understanding of the state of the art in learned dexterous manipulation and control, with judgment about which open problems are worth advancing
• Experience with Python and PyTorch or JAX, plus familiarity with ROS or comparable robotics middleware
• Must obtain work authorization in the country of employment at the time of hire and maintain ongoing work authorization during employment

Preferred Qualifications:

• Proven track record of achieving significant results as demonstrated by grants, fellowships, patents, as well as first-authored publications at leading workshops or conferences such as Robotics (RSS, ICRA, IROS, CoRL, T-RO, IJRR), Machine Learning (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, JMLR), and Computer Vision (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, TPAMI), or similar
• Experience training modern control policies, including flow matching, diffusion, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and large behavior models
• Familiarity with modeling and analysis used in robotics including kinematics, dynamics, trajectory optimization, motion planning, perception, task planning, and control theory
• Hands-on experience with multi-fingered robotic hand manipulation, and with parallel-jaw or other grippers mounted on a robot arm
• Experience with motion retargeting across human and robot embodiments
• Experience with sim-to-real and real-to-sim workflows, including domain randomization, system identification, scene reconstruction, and closing the transfer gap
• Experience collecting and learning from real robot hand demonstrations, whether through teleoperation, kinesthetic guidance, or wearable capture, with bimanual setups a plus
• Experience with multimodal or self-supervised representation learning and cross-embodiment transfer
• Experience with vision based input recognition systems, such as hand tracking, pose estimation, and object pose estimation
• Experience working with time sequence sensor data, such as tactile and IMU streams
• Experience with hand force estimation and its applications in robot policy learning
• Experience designing data collection protocols and building high quality, diverse datasets
• Experience bringing up and debugging prototype software and hardware systems such as robot platforms, multi-camera tracking rigs, or wearable sensing systems
• Experience working and communicating cross functionally in a team environment
• Availability for minimum 16 consecutive week internship

About Meta:

Meta builds technologies that help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses. When Facebook launched in 2004, it changed the way people connect. Apps like Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp further empowered billions around the world. Now, Meta is moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology. People who choose to build their careers by building with us at Meta help shape a future that will take us beyond what digital connection makes possible today—beyond the constraints of screens, the limits of distance, and even the rules of physics.

Meta is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Meta participates in the E-Verify program in certain locations, as required by law. Please note that Meta may leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies in connection with applications for employment.

Meta is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process. If you need any assistance or accommodations due to a disability, please let us know at [email protected].

$7,650/month to $12,667/month + benefits

Individual compensation is determined by skills, qualifications, experience, and location. Compensation details listed in this posting reflect the base hourly rate, monthly rate, or annual salary only, and do not include bonus, equity or sales incentives, if applicable. In addition to base compensation, Meta offers benefits. Learn more about benefits at Meta.