Research Engineer, Simulation for Robot Learning
About The Position
At Toyota Research Institute (TRI), we're on a mission to improve the quality of human life. We're developing new tools and capabilities to amplify the human experience. To lead this transformative shift in mobility, we've built a world-class team in Automated Driving, Energy & Materials, Human-Centered AI, Human Interactive Driving, Large Behavior Models, and Robotics. The Team We're on a mission to improve the quality of human life by creating robots that can learn, adapt, and assist in everyday environments. We are building a world-class team to push the boundaries of robot learning, combining machine learning, perception, prediction, and action to produce robust and coordinated robot behaviors. The Opportunity We're looking for a motivated Research Engineer to help develop the next generation of AI-powered robots through high-fidelity simulation and Large Behavior Models. In this role, you'll work at the intersection of machine learning, computer vision, robotics, and physics-based modeling to enable scalable and generalizable robot policy development. Experience with simulation or embodied systems (robots, autonomous vehicles, etc.) is a strong plus. As part of our team, you'll contribute to cutting-edge research while leveraging TRI's expertise in ML, cloud, software, and hardware to build systems that move from simulation to real-world deployment.
Requirements
- Bachelor's or master's degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Physics, or a related field.
- 2+ years of professional engineering experience at an AI/ML-focused organization.
- Strong proficiency in Python and experience with simulation frameworks such as Isaac Sim, PyBullet, MuJoCo, or similar.
- Hands-on experience with robotics simulation, reinforcement learning, or large-scale machine learning.
- Familiarity with state-of-the-art methods in behavior learning and/or computer vision.
- Experience integrating ML models into simulated or real-world environments.
- Extensive practical experience with PyTorch.
- Ability to alternate between rapid prototyping and production-quality implementation.
- Solid understanding of software engineering best practices, including testing, CI/CD, and documentation.
Nice To Haves
- Experience deploying models on embodied systems/robots.
- Experience working in mixed teams of research scientists and engineers.
- Exposure to MLOps tools and infrastructure (e.g., Docker, EC2, S3, Sagemaker).
Responsibilities
- Build, improve, and robustify end-to-end integrated ML pipelines for training multimodal (language, images, 3D, video, actions) models at scale.
- Develop and manage physics-based robot simulation environments enabling scalable training and evaluation of learning-based behavior models in realistic, physically grounded scenarios.
- Integrate and validate learned policies in simulation, assessing real-world applicability, generalization, and performance across diverse environments, tasks, geometries, and sensor viewpoints.
- Train, finetune, and serve robot foundation models with a strong MLOps mindset.
- Build processes for integrating collaboration-produced and open-source advancements and code into our internal stack.
- Collaborate with internal research scientists and our partner labs at top academic institutions and Toyota research labs to drive pioneering research at scale.
Benefits
- TRI offers a generous benefits package including medical, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k) eligibility, paid time off benefits (including vacation, sick time, and parental leave), and an annual cash bonus structure.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
Industry
Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services
Number of Employees
101-250 employees
