Deep Learning Robot Manipulation Engineer

Persona AI Inc • Houston, TX

96d

About The Position

Persona AI is developing and commercializing rugged, multi-purpose humanoid robots that perform real work. Persona’s founding team has a decades-long history in humanoid robotics, bionics, and product development delivering robust hardware that has touched the stars, worked miles below the surface of the ocean, and even roamed Disney Parks. Our mission is focused squarely on shipping beautiful, reliable products at massive scale, while building a customer-focused team to achieve these aims. We're looking for a Deep Learning Manipulation Engineer to help train Persona AI robots to do real work in real world environments. We're looking for exceptional people who dream big, thrive on challenges, and love seeing their efforts come to life. We are primarily interested in candidates who have developed and released products to the market, but can be flexible depending on aptitude and energy. As one of the inaugural Deep Learning Manipulation Engineers at Persona, you will have an incredible opportunity to get in at the beginning to shape the design and development of Persona’s deep learning and manipulation strategy and infrastructure. If you're passionate about cutting-edge technology and want to be part of a world-class team we'd love to hear from you.

Requirements

• Courage and grit to tackle some of the hardest problems in robot manipulation.
• Enthusiasm for working collaboratively in fast paced ambiguous environments.
• Masters or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, or a related field.
• 3+ years of experience in applying deep learning to robotic manipulation.
• Strong understanding and proficiency with state of the art algorithms and best-practices in behavior cloning, vision-language-action models, diffusion policies, foundation models, etc.
• Experience with cloud computing and large-scale datasets.
• Understanding of the challenges of deploying neural network models in the real world.
• Capable of writing high quality software.
• Strong first principles thinker.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with other aspects of ML applied to robotics, including computer vision algorithms, sensors, point clouds, segmentation and object detection.
• Published papers at top ML/Robotics conferences (ICML, ICRA, CoRL, RSS, NeurIPS).
• Have deployed robots, collected large amounts of data, and trained large neural networks that work in production environments.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement advanced deep learning models and training procedures to achieve dexterous manipulation for humanoid robots with high DOF and multi-fingered hands.
• Train models, using curriculum learning strategies, to progress from simple object interactions to precise grasping, long-horizon tasks, tool-use, and in-hand object manipulation.
• Incorporate tactile sensing and proprioception into end-to-end learning pipelines, enabling robust closed-loop policies.
• Work with the teleoperation and data team to design data collection and versioning strategies.
• Leverage existing state-of-the-art manipulation models and contribute to the development of new architectures for emerging complex tasks.
• Deploy trained manipulation models to robotic hardware, ensuring real-time performance, safety, and integration with control systems and sensors.
• Collaboratively develop and optimize the manipulation ML pipeline.
• Keep up to date with the state of the art in research and development.
• Develop and execute evaluation pipelines to rigorously test learned manipulation models, including real-world trials and simulation, measuring performance, robustness, and generalization across tasks and environments.
• Collaborate in attracting, nurturing and growing the machine learning and autonomy teams.

Benefits

• You'll shape technology that's redefining the possibilities of robotics and human interaction.
• Work alongside passionate teammates who value diversity, creativity, and continuous learning.
• Enjoy full access to advanced prototyping tools, labs, and the freedom to experiment and innovate.
• We offer competitive compensation, excellent benefits, flexible work environment, and equity opportunities.
• Persona AI embraces diversity and equal opportunity in a serious way. We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. We believe the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Number of Employees: 1-10 employees