Research Engineer, Robotics Data

We're looking for a Research Engineer for our Robotics team to develop the datasets and evals that make robotics data useful for training and evaluating embodied AI systems. You'll translate open-ended research needs into data specifications, build methods to validate data, and run experiments to understand which data and structures improve model performance.

Responsibilities

Research the data needs of robot learning and physical AI systems, and turn them into concrete dataset and evaluation specifications; Define data schemas, annotations, ground truth, and quality standards across robotics data types; Design collection and review protocols that external data providers can execute reliably; Build tools and validation workflows to audit datasets, identify quality issues, and give providers actionable feedback; Run experiments and analyze model behavior to understand how data quality, coverage, and structure affect performance; Work with HUD's research and engineering teams, and when needed with data vendors and buyers, to improve robotics data offerings

Requirements

Experience in robotics, robot learning, embodied AI, or closely related multimodal research; Proficiency in Python and experience building data processing, analysis, or evaluation tools; Experience turning research questions into dataset specifications, experiments, and measurable quality criteria; Strong understanding of what makes robotics data useful for training or evaluation—and where it can be misleading; Attention to detail and the ability to spot subtle errors, coverage gaps, and failure modes in complex data; Experience building research tools or pipelines without a fully prescribed roadmap

Nice to have

Worked with robot trajectories, demonstrations, video, sensor data, simulation, or other multimodal robotics datasets; Experience with imitation learning, reinforcement learning, or vision-language-action models; Worked in unstructured problem spaces and take ownership from early research through production deployment; Early-stage startup experience and strong communication skills for collaboration across teams and time zones

Benefits

Competitive compensation; 100% covered top-of-the-line medical, dental, and vision (US and Singapore employees); Lunch and dinner for in-office employees; Company-wide holiday break (Christmas Eve to New Year's Day) on top of PTO and paid holidays; 401k with a 4% match; Equinox membership and commuter benefits (US employees); Health/wellness stipend (Singapore employees); Unlimited access to tokens for ChatGPT, Claude Code, Cursor, etc.; Annual travel budget to visit either office; Visa sponsorship and relocation support for strong full-time candidates