Senior AI Software Engineer (AI Controls)

TL;DR

Senior AI Software Engineer (AI Controls): Developing high-rate learned controllers for humanoid robots to enable robust and safe movement in dynamic environments with an accent on reinforcement learning (RL) and perception integration. Focus on designing RL policies for locomotion and manipulation, improving sim-to-real transfer, and deploying production-quality software to real-world robots.

Location: Hybrid (Fremont, CA, Salem, OR, or Pittsburgh, PA). All roles are U.S.-based; applicants must have current authorization to work in the United States.

Salary: $187,000 – $292,000 USD

Company

A pioneer in humanoid robotics, developing Digit to operate alongside humans in warehouses and manufacturing facilities to automate physically demanding tasks.

What you will do

• Design, train, and deploy robust RL policies for locomotion, manipulation, and whole-body control.
• Integrate real-time perception into RL policies to achieve obstacle-aware, collision-free motion.
• Develop and maintain core RL infrastructure, including scalable training pipelines and evaluation frameworks.
• Design and implement new simulation environments and tasks using Mujoco-Warp or Isaac.
• Collaborate with on-robot software teams to ship production-quality policies to the Digit robot.

Requirements

• 4+ years of experience developing and deploying RL policies for robotics applications.
• Strong Python skills and hands-on experience with PyTorch.
• Experience designing reward functions, tuning hyperparameters, and implementing exploration strategies.
• Proven experience deploying RL policies on real-world bipedal or quadrupedal robots.
• Familiarity with robot simulation environments and sim-to-real transfer.
• Must have current authorization to work in the United States.

Nice to have

• Advanced degree (MS or PhD) in Robotics, Computer Science, or a related field.
• Experience with contact-rich manipulation, force-torque, or tactile sensing.
• Familiarity with policy distillation (teacher–student) for perception-driven policies.
• Publications in top ML or robotics conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, CoRL, RSS, ICRA).

Culture & Benefits

• 401(k) plan with a 6% company match and company stock options.
• 100% company-paid medical, dental, vision, and short/long-term disability insurance.
• Flexible, unlimited PTO for exempt employees and 12 company holidays.
• Catered lunches and healthy snacks at Salem and Pittsburgh locations.
• Professional development and tuition reimbursement programs.
• Relocation assistance provided for eligible roles.