Full-Stack Robotics & AI Engineer

The role

You will take a learning-based robotics system from model development to reliable operation on a physical robot. You will work across perception, policy learning, inference, and robot integration.

What you will do

• Develop models for robotic manipulation.
• Fine-tune and evaluate vision and action models for robotic manipulation, using pretrained models and robot data.
• Build the software that connects cameras and other sensors to model inference and robot commands.
• Deploy models on robot hardware and optimize inference latency, memory use, and throughput.
• Implement responsive policy execution, including asynchronous inference and action chunking.
• Debug failures across the full system from observations and model outputs to middleware and physical motion.
• Build logging, replay, and evaluation tools.
• Package robot capabilities with clear interfaces, reproducible configurations, and tests.

Required qualifications

• Strong Python skills.
• Practical experience training or fine-tuning models in PyTorch or a comparable framework.
• Experience integrating learning or perception systems with physical robots, including coordinate frames, sensor calibration, and action or control interfaces.
• Ability to profile software, identify runtime bottlenecks, and debug problems that span models, robotics software, and hardware.
• A record of building working systems and evaluating them on real tasks, with a clear understanding of your own technical contributions.
• Comfort working closely with researchers and engineers, making practical tradeoffs, and iterating from experimental results.

Nice to have

• Robot learning frameworks such as LeRobot or openpi, imitation learning, or vision-language-action models.
• Model distillation and inference optimization with tools such as ONNX or TensorRT.
• Dexterous or contact-rich manipulation, asynchronous policy execution, or reusable robot skill interfaces.

About the company

Astera Institute is a private foundation supporting ambitious work in science and technology through grants, investments, and in-house research. Its research programs combine the pace and autonomy of a startup with the freedom to pursue difficult scientific questions.