Founding Research Engineer

Apply on YC · Original job listing

• Role: Engineering / Machine learning
• Experience: Any (new grads ok)
• Visa: Will sponsor
• Skills: ML, Python, Torch/PyTorch, Distributed Systems, Fine-tuning, Evals, AI Agents, Diffusion Models

We’re hiring a Founding Research Engineer to help build and eventually lead a team of exceptional engineers and researchers.

Your most important responsibility will be accelerating the research loop: ideating directions, leading a team to build them into working systems, and deploying those systems to gather feedback. The speed with which you iterate is central to our success. In your first 30 days, you’ll plan a new capability for our API, launch training runs and implement your plan, then deploy it on robots in factories.

This role combines collaboration with hand-on work. You’ll work with the founders to set technical direction, take ownership of execution, and contribute directly to the systems you lead. You should be comfortable designing complex systems and diving into the implementation yourself.

What You’ll Do

• Grow and lead a small, high-performing team, setting clear expectations and maintaining a high bar for technical quality and execution.
• Set technical direction and make foundational architecture and system-design decisions, with a focus on reliability and performance. 
• Build core systems, including agent harnesses, robot simulation and evaluation environments, trace-collection pipelines, and infrastructure for post-training models.
• Recruit and close exceptional engineering and research talent.

Skills and Qualifications

• Strong research judgment: you can turn open-ended ideas into concrete experiments, interpret the results, and iterate quickly.