Member of Technical Staff, Robotics Data

XDOF • San Mateo, CA

8d • $180,000 - $250,000

About The Position

XDOF is building data collection systems, operational capability, an exabyte-scale data warehouse, and a software toolchain to support the development of general-purpose robots. The Robotics Data Engineer will help ensure that collected data is trustworthy across modalities, including data from teleoperation on real hardware, egocentric capture, and UMI-style grippers. The role analyzes and validates data, builds quality tooling, detects problems, and helps improve the processes that caused them.

The position bridges raw data collection and usable training data. It includes developing automated ingestion validation, creating and documenting consistent and versioned data schemas, building visualization tools, validating temporal alignment across sensor streams, and defining metrics to track data quality. The engineer will also catalog failure modes and work with data collection operators to investigate root causes such as hardware calibration, sensor drift, or operator-specific issues.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree, or equivalent experience, in robotics, computer science, mechanical engineering, or a related field.
• Strong Python data skills, including experience with NumPy, pandas, and matplotlib or Plotly, and comfort working with large, messy datasets.
• Solid understanding of 3D geometry, coordinate frames, and spatial transformations.
• Intuition for physical systems and the ability to recognize anomalies in trajectories or joint-velocity plots.
• Experience designing or working with structured data formats such as protobuf, HDF5, ROS bags, or similar.

Nice To Haves

• Hands-on experience with robotics data from a research lab, robotics startup, or manipulation or locomotion project.
• Experience with teleoperation systems, motion capture, or egocentric data collection.
• Experience with signal processing, sensor fusion, or time-series analysis.
• Experience building internal data visualization tools or dashboards for technical teams.
• Experience with data versioning, lineage tracking, or schema migration in a production setting.
• Comfort working in 0→1 environments.
• Mission-driven and passionate about robotics.

Responsibilities

• Analyze robotics data across modalities to identify quality issues, including plotting joint velocities, validating camera poses, checking gripper encoder accuracy, and flagging anomalous collection sessions.
• Build automated validation pipelines that run during ingestion and catch problems before data enters the warehouse.
• Design and document data formats and schemas across collection modalities, ensuring they are consistent, versioned, and understood by partners and internal researchers.
• Build data visualization tools and dashboards that allow the broader team to inspect and understand data without writing custom scripts.
• Validate cross-modal temporal alignment, including timestamp synchronization, dropped-frame detection, and clock drift across camera, joint, and gripper streams.
• Define quality metrics and thresholds for each modality and track whether data quality improves or degrades as collection scales.
• Catalog edge cases and failure modes in a shared taxonomy.
• Work with data collection operators to trace quality issues to root causes, including systemic issues such as hardware calibration or sensor drift and operator-specific issues.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time