Research Engineer – Robotics & Embodied AI

Elorian • Palo Alto, CA

6d

About The Position

Elorian is an early-stage AI lab building multimodal foundation models. The Research Engineer – Robotics & Embodied AI will apply robotics expertise to foundation-scale AI, working with the core foundation-model research team to incorporate physical-world priors, address practical robotics challenges, and develop capabilities that generalize across robotics applications.

The role focuses on advancing visual reasoning, 3D spatial understanding, and physical-affordance capabilities in multimodal foundation models; developing scalable pipelines for robotic data collection, teleoperation, trajectory annotation, quality assessment, and evaluation; and exploring task planning, hierarchical reasoning, and decision-making using multimodal foundation models and Vision-Language-Action architectures. The engineer will collaborate with foundation-model researchers and robotics partners to identify real-world bottlenecks, assess model capabilities, and build foundational AI solutions for robotics.

Requirements

• Strong background in robotics research or engineering, with firsthand experience in robotic perception, planning, control, or robot learning.
• Interest in applying robotics domain knowledge to large-scale deep learning, multimodal architectures, and foundation-model research.
• Solid machine-learning experience and hands-on familiarity with modern LLMs, multimodal foundation models (VLMs), or transformer architectures.
• Strong research and problem-solving skills, including the ability to independently investigate open-ended, complex technical challenges.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with robotics simulation environments such as Isaac Sim or MuJoCo for large-scale data generation, policy evaluation, or model pre-training.
• Experience with robotics datasets, trajectory annotation, task decomposition, and benchmark evaluation for physical systems.
• Experience applying, fine-tuning, or developing LLMs, VLMs, or Vision-Language-Action models for robotics problems.
• Experience working with real-world robotic systems, such as manipulation, navigation, or autonomous agents, and understanding the practical limits of deploying policies to physical hardware.
• Deep expertise in robotic planning, 3D spatial reasoning, affordance modeling, or embodied intelligence.

Responsibilities

• Advance and evaluate visual reasoning, 3D spatial understanding, and physical-affordance capabilities in multimodal foundation models for robotic perception and control.
• Design scalable robotics data pipelines, including data collection, teleoperation, trajectory annotation, automated quality assessment, and evaluation frameworks for multimodal robotic data.
• Investigate and implement approaches to robotic task planning, hierarchical reasoning, and decision-making powered by multimodal foundation models and Vision-Language-Action architectures.
• Collaborate with foundation-model researchers and robotics partners to identify real-world bottlenecks, evaluate model capabilities, and develop foundational AI solutions for robotics.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed