Robot Learning Research Engineer

Robot Learning Research Engineer | Paris

Our client is a seed stage physical AI company based in Paris, spun out of one of Europe's leading robotics research institutes. Their software lets a humanoid robot learn a new industrial task from a handful of demonstrations and be working on the production line in under an hour, with no code.

The software is hardware agnostic and runs across multiple humanoid platforms. It is already deployed with major European manufacturers in automotive, industrial equipment and consumer goods.

The team is small and research led. The CTO is a world renowned researcher in robotics and machine learning, and the company combines the rigour of a research lab with the pace of an early stage startup.

The role

You will design the few shot imitation learning algorithms at the core of the product. The central challenge is data efficiency: learning robust, generalising behaviour from a few demonstrations rather than thousands. Every improvement you make ships directly into real factories.

As one of the first 15 hires, you will help shape the company's long term research agenda, culture and hiring.

Responsibilities

• Design, prototype and evaluate few shot imitation learning algorithms

• Advance the state of the art in imitation learning, policy learning and representation learning for control

• Run rigorous experiments on real robots, including humanoids, mobile manipulators and industrial arms

• Turn research prototypes into algorithms robust enough for production

• Work closely with the Vision & Perception and Integration teams to take research from prototype to deployment

• Help shape the research roadmap and future hiring

Requirements

• PhD in robotics, machine learning or a related field from a leading research lab

• Research experience at a top academic group or industry lab

• Publications at top venues such as CoRL, RSS, ICRA, IROS, NeurIPS or ICML

• Deep expertise in imitation learning, learning from demonstration or policy learning for robots

• Hands on experience training and debugging learning systems on real robots, not only in simulation

• Strong Python and PyTorch

• Professional English

Nice to have

• Few shot learning or meta learning for control

• Representation learning for embodied agents

• Experience with humanoids or other high DoF platforms

• Postdoctoral or industry research lab experience

• A track record of taking research into deployed systems

• ROS 2 familiarity

What's on offer

• Open salary for the right candidate

• Early and generous founding equity

• Full relocation support to Paris

• EU and non EU candidates welcome

• English speaking team, no French required

• Access to a fleet of advanced robots, including humanoids

• Research that ships into real factories

• Real ownership of the research agenda