Research Engineer/Research Scientist - Dexterous Manipulation

Rhoda ai • Palo Alto, CA

2d

About The Position

At Rhoda AI, we're building the full-stack foundation for the next generation of humanoid robots — from high-performance, software-defined hardware to the foundational models and video world models that control it. Our robots are designed to be generalists capable of operating in complex, real-world environments and handling scenarios unseen in training. We work at the intersection of large-scale learning, robotics, and systems, with a research team that includes researchers from Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, and beyond. We're not building a feature; we're building a new computing platform for physical work — and with over $400M raised, we're investing aggressively in the R&D, hardware development, and manufacturing scale-up to make that a reality. We're looking for a Research Scientist or Research Engineer to advance dexterous manipulation — enabling our robots to perform contact-rich, fine-motor tasks that require precision, physical reasoning, and adaptability to novel objects and environments.

Requirements

• Strong background in robot learning, manipulation, or physical AI
• Hands-on experience developing and evaluating manipulation policies on real hardware
• Understanding of contact mechanics, grasp planning, or tactile sensing
• Solid ML skills with experience in imitation learning, RL, or diffusion-based policies
• Ability to work across the stack from simulation to real robot deployment

Nice To Haves

• PhD in Robotics, ML, or a related field
• Publication record at ICRA, CoRL, RSS, NeurIPS, or related venues
• Prior work on dexterous hands, multi-finger manipulation, or contact-rich tasks
• Experience with tactile sensors or force/torque feedback in robot learning
• Familiarity with simulation tools for manipulation (MuJoCo, Isaac Sim, Genesis)
• Experience with skill libraries, language-conditioned manipulation, or task parameterization

Responsibilities

• Research and develop learning-based approaches for dexterous and contact-rich manipulation tasks
• Design training strategies and data collection protocols for fine-motor and multi-finger manipulation
• Work on perception for manipulation: contact detection, tactile sensing, object pose estimation, and spatial reasoning
• Build and evaluate policies that generalize to novel objects and unstructured environments
• Develop simulation environments and benchmarks for dexterous manipulation research
• Collaborate with robot hardware, perception, and learning teams to close the sim-to-real gap
• Publish and present work at top-tier robotics and ML venues (especially valued for RS track)

Benefits

• Push the frontier on one of the hardest open problems in robotics
• Work with hardware and data resources that few research labs have access to
• Direct path from research results to deployment on our humanoid platform
• Tight collaboration across robot learning, hardware, and systems teams

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree