Research Engineer

The role

You will pick open problems across the system including motion, perception, sensing, actuation, thermals, inference, and tooling. You will take these problems from first idea to working artifact and ship end to end.

What you will do

• Pick open problems across the system and take them from first idea to working artifact
• Try unlikely approaches and use failures to learn
• Build evaluations including metrics, probes, and side-by-side tests
• Create, bootstrap, synthesize, and curate data
• Ship end to end including models, datasets, firmware, demos, and robots
• Work across abstraction layers from circuits to trained models
• Write up results and methods for reproducibility
• Use AI as a research collaborator to map search spaces and run experiments

Required qualifications

• Body of self-directed work such as projects, repositories, write-ups, videos, or robots
• Experience taking at least one idea from what if to a working, measured artifact, end to end
• Fluent in Python
• Comfortable with C/C++, embedded, or electronics or a record of learning a new layer
• Have trained, evaluated, and deployed ML models
• Can reason about latency and compute on edge devices
• Have built real hardware from parts, not from a kit
• Can explain failures as clearly as successes
• Degree in engineering, computer science, physics, or a related field, or equivalent proof of work

Nice to have

• Published research
• Open-source projects people actually use
• A public body of technical writing

About the company

Human Computer Lab is a research lab building character robots that feel alive and responsive. Their goal is to push the frontier of human-robot interaction by making technology more legible, emotionally intuitive, and human-centered.