ML Engineer - Robotics
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Description
At PhyAgents, a machine learning engineer works across the full loop that makes a robot better: data, models, training, simulation, evaluation, and deployment on real hardware. You'll do research-grade work and ship it onto robots in the same quarter. A result that doesn't run on the robot isn't finished.
Responsibilities:
- Training and post-training: Train and post-train robotic foundation models, including vision-language-action models, using imitation learning and reinforcement learning. You'll own the work from data loading through multi-GPU training runs.
- Training infrastructure: Build and scale distributed multi-node GPU training, data loaders that keep GPUs fed, and reproducible pipelines with experiment tracking.
- Simulation: Build simulation environments for our tasks. Train policies with reinforcement learning that transfer to real robots.
- Rewards and verifiers: Design the reward functions and the verifiers that check whether a task step actually succeeded.
- Evaluation: Build harnesses that tell us whether a model actually got better, in simulation and on real hardware. Design the metrics that decide what ships.
- Data and data infrastructure: Define what data the models need. Build the pipelines that turn raw robot episodes into versioned, training-ready datasets. Trace a stuck policy back to its data.
- Models on robots: Get models running reliably and fast enough on real hardware. Debug failures in the lab across the model, the data, and the robot.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of hands-on experience training and shipping ML models in production or in a research lab, with a B. Tech, M. Tech or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or a related field.
- A track record of owning an ML system end to end: you've taken something from problem definition through data, training, evaluation, and deployment, and you can tell us what you'd do differently.
- Deep hands-on experience with PyTorch, including writing and debugging non-trivial training loops.
- Experience training at scale: multi-GPU or multi-node training (DDP, FSDP, DeepSpeed, or equivalent) and the profiling work to keep it efficient.
- Strong fundamentals in linear algebra, probability, optimisation, and machine learning, and in data structures, algorithms, and systems.
- Strong software engineering habits: you write code others can build on, and hold a high bar for code quality.
Preferred:
- Experience post-training transformers, diffusion models, or multimodal models, especially with imitation learning or reinforcement learning.
- Experience in robotics, autonomous vehicles, or another domain where models act in the physical world and failures are expensive.
- Experience with robot simulation (MuJoCo, Isaac Sim, PyBullet) and sim-to-real transfer.
- Experience building data pipelines for large multimodal datasets (object storage, Ray or Spark, Parquet, WebDataset).
- Experience deploying models to constrained or real-time hardware (ONNX, TensorRT, quantisation, latency work).
- Publications at top AI or robotics venues, or meaningful open-source contributions.
- Experience mentoring engineers or leading a small technical effort.