Research Engineer, Robotics - Roboticist

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence•Seattle, WA

14h•$128,880 - $193,320•Onsite

About The Position

Ai2 is hiring a Research Engineer, Robotics to own the control stack for physical robots and the path from simulation to hardware. This is primarily a controls role: the engineer will bring up and tune real-time, torque-level control for arms, multi-fingered hands, bimanual systems, and humanoids, ensuring hardware is stable and safe for daily research experiments. The role also includes building interfaces for learned policies and designing and fabricating research hardware, from end-effectors to test rigs. The engineer will work closely with research scientists and the simulation team to make learned behavior transfer reliably to real robots. The Robotics team uses scalable simulation to study how foundation models scale and generalize for robotics, with work spanning manipulation, humanoid and whole-body control, large-scale simulated training, sim-to-real transfer, robot foundation models, and skill learning. The team publishes at major research venues and releases its work as open source. The position is expected to work from Ai2’s Seattle offices; on-site requirements vary by position and team. Ai2 is a Seattle-based nonprofit AI research institute founded in 2014. It describes itself as a learning, diverse, inclusive, collaborative, and transparent organization that emphasizes work/life balance. The employer is an Equal Opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants and employees with disabilities.

Requirements

Master’s degree and at least 3 years of experience, or a PhD, in robotics, control, or a related field; candidates with a bachelor’s degree and at least 3 years of industry experience are also considered.
Experience implementing and tuning real-time controllers on physical robots, such as joint, impedance, operational-space, or torque control; grounding in rigid-body dynamics, control theory, stability analysis, and system identification.
Understanding of floating-base dynamics, contact constraints, and inverse dynamics, and experience with at least one of QP-based whole-body control, operational-space control, or MPC on hardware or in a high-fidelity simulator.
Substantial hands-on real-robot manipulation experience, including bringing up, calibrating, and controlling arms with grippers or hands.
Experience designing end-to-end robot software systems, including 500 Hz to 1 kHz control loops, state estimation, data flow, and interfaces between planning, perception, and learning; ability to reason about latency, reliability, and failure modes.
Strong Python and solid real-time C++ skills.
Experience designing and building hardware used on a real robot, such as end-effectors, mounts, fixtures, or rigs; CAD skills with SolidWorks, Fusion 360, Onshape, or similar, and design-for-manufacturing experience for 3D printing or machining.
Experience training or deploying learned policies (imitation learning, RL, or VLA) on real robots, and familiarity with PyTorch and at least one simulation ecosystem such as Isaac Lab or MuJoCo.
Ability to debug across the full stack, from perception through control to hardware, and communicate clearly with a structured, systems-oriented approach.

Nice To Haves

Humanoid whole-body control on hardware, including locomotion, loco-manipulation, balance, and contact-rich tasks; hands-on experience bringing up and deploying Unitree G1, H1, similar platforms, or comparable humanoids.
Depth in control theory, including Lyapunov and passivity-based methods, contact-stable and compliant control, dynamical-systems approaches to motion generation, and reduced-order models such as centroidal dynamics, SRBD, or LIPM, with hardware application experience.
Sim-to-real work for whole-body policies, including training RL locomotion or loco-manipulation policies in GPU-accelerated simulators such as Isaac Lab or MuJoCo Warp and deploying them stably on a real humanoid using domain randomization, actuator modeling, and safety wrappers.
Whole-body state estimation and sensor fusion using IMUs, joint encoders, force/torque sensing, contact estimation, or Kalman filtering.
Experience with bimanual systems, multi-fingered hands, or tactile sensing.
Teleoperation systems such as VR, leader-follower arms, hand and body tracking, or whole-body retargeting, and large-scale data collection.
Robotics middleware and infrastructure experience, including ROS 2, DDS or Zenoh, real-time Linux, containerization, or CI/CD.
Hand-eye and multi-camera calibration, depth sensing, or 3D perception on hardware.
Open-source contributions or publications at robotics venues such as CoRL, RSS, ICRA, IROS, or Humanoids.

Responsibilities

Build and own real-time joint, impedance, operational-space, and torque-control stacks for torque-controlled arms, hands, and humanoids, including motion planning, safety layers, and interfaces for learned policies across embodiments.
Bring up, tune, and stabilize whole-body controllers for humanoids and bimanual systems, including QP- or MPC-based control, state estimation, contact handling, recovery, and sim-to-real transfer of locomotion and loco-manipulation policies.
Set up, calibrate, maintain, and tune robots, including arms, grippers, multi-fingered hands, humanoids, cameras, and tactile sensors across single-arm, bimanual, mobile, and legged platforms.
Diagnose stability, latency, and contact problems across hardware, firmware, control, and learned policies; use system identification and dynamics models to improve real-world reliability.
Design and build lab hardware such as end-effectors, fingertips, sensor mounts, fixtures, and test rigs, from CAD through 3D printing or machining, and integrate cameras, tactile sensors, and hands.
Build robot runtime and tooling, including teleoperation, data collection, logging, monitoring, deployment, and operator-facing tools.
Contribute to open-source releases and publications.

Benefits

Medical, dental, and vision coverage for team members and their families.
Basic life insurance and basic accidental death and dismemberment insurance.
Short-term and long-term disability coverage.
Employee assistance program.
Voluntary life insurance and voluntary accidental death and dismemberment programs.
Health savings account, healthcare reimbursement arrangement, and healthcare and dependent care flexible spending account plans.
Company 401(k) plan.
$125 per month to assist with commuting or internet expenses.
$200 per month for fitness and wellbeing expenses.
Up to ten sick days per year, up to seven personal days per year, up to 20 vacation days per year, and twelve paid holidays per year.
Annual bonuses and participation in a long-term incentive plan.
Family leave.
Ongoing education and learning opportunities.