Research Member of Technical Staff- Post-training & Robot Learning

The role

This person will adapt web-pretrained video models to real robot tasks. They will design RL training pipelines, develop RL algorithms, and build evaluation frameworks for post-trained policies.

What you will do

• Design and implement RL training pipelines to improve robot policy performance
• Develop and apply RL algorithms adapted to the video prediction setting
• Design and implement broader post-training pipelines including supervised fine-tuning and preference optimization
• Work on the inverse dynamics model that translates video predictions into executable robot actions
• Build evaluation frameworks for post-trained policies
• Research methods to efficiently adapt models to new tasks with minimal demonstration data
• Identify failure modes and systematic weaknesses in deployed robot policies
• Iterate quickly between simulation and real robot evaluation
• Collaborate with the pre-training team to surface missing capabilities

Required qualifications

• Hands-on experience with robot systems, robotic policy learning, or autonomous systems in an industry or research setting
• Strong understanding of robot policy learning: imitation learning, behavior cloning, and how RL builds on top of it
• Practical familiarity with real robot hardware, deployment constraints, and sensor modalities
• Solid ML skills with hands-on PyTorch experience
• Ability to diagnose policy failures, reason about distribution shift, and iterate effectively on data and training strategies
• Comfort with ambiguity and fast-changing research priorities

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with reinforcement learning applied to real or near-real environments
• Prior industry experience in robotics, autonomous driving, or physical AI
• Experience with teleoperation systems or robot demonstration collection at scale
• Familiarity with robot middleware (ROS/ROS2) and real-time control systems
• Experience with simulation environments for robotics (MuJoCo, Isaac Sim, Genesis)
• Understanding of video generation models and how they connect to action prediction
• PhD in Robotics, ML, or a related field
• Publication record at ICRA, CoRL, RSS, NeurIPS, or related venues

About the company

Rhoda AI is building the next generation of generalist intelligent robots. They own the full robotics stack from hardware to foundation world models.