Humanoid Engineer, Manipulation (Robotics)

Location: Irvine, California, United States; on-site

Company

Develops risk-aware, reliable, field-ready embodied AI systems for real-world robotic deployments.

What you will do

• Design, implement, and evaluate humanoid manipulation and loco-manipulation behaviors on physical robots.
• Integrate perception, planning, control, grasping, whole-body coordination, and task execution into deployable workflows.
• Run hardware experiments, analyze failures, and improve manipulation reliability across objects, environments, and tasks.
• Collaborate with system integration, hardware, field application, and testing teams to move capabilities from prototype to deployment.
• Support teleoperation, data collection, and human-in-the-loop workflows.
• Build evaluation tools, metrics, and protocols for success, repeatability, failure recovery, and operator usability.

Requirements

• MS or PhD in Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field preferred; BS candidates with strong hands-on robotics experience considered.
• Hands-on experience with robotic manipulation, humanoids, mobile manipulation, dexterous hands, or contact-rich robotics using physical hardware; simulation-only experience is not considered.
• Strong foundation in kinematics, dynamics, motion planning, control, and real-robot experimentation.
• Experience with C++, Python, ROS or ROS2, and Linux in a real robotics codebase.
• Ability to iterate from experiments to working behavior on physical hardware, analyze failures, and adapt in real time.
• Background appropriate for a junior-to-mid engineer; fresh MS and PhD graduates are welcome.

Nice to have

• Experience with humanoid platforms or contact-rich, dexterous manipulation systems.
• Robot learning experience on physical hardware, including imitation learning, reinforcement learning, or task and motion planning.
• Experience taking manipulation capabilities from prototype to reliable, repeatable field behavior.
• Experience building manipulation evaluation frameworks, test suites, and success or failure metrics.

Culture & Benefits

• Work directly with real robots, sensors, and field deployments.
• Capabilities are tested on hardware and improved through real-world operation.
• Close collaboration across engineering, hardware, field application, and testing functions.
• Daily hands-on experimentation in an on-site robotics environment.