Senior Machine Learning Engineer — San Francisco Bay Area

Founding Machine Learning Engineer

$150,000 - $220,000 base salary

San Francisco

About the company

We're partnering with a venture-backed robotics startup in San Francisco. They're building AI that lets robots take on real-world tasks outside the lab. The team is small, technical and moving fast, with robots already working in the field.

The role

This is one of the first ML hires. You'll own how the robots learn, from the data pipeline through to the models running on real hardware. You'll work directly with the founders and have a big say in the technical direction.

What you'll do

• Build and train models for robot manipulation and control

• Design the data pipeline, from real-world robot data to simulation

• Move models from simulation onto real robots, and close the sim-to-real gap

• Set up the tools and processes the ML team will grow into

• Help hire the next ML engineers

What you'll bring

• 4+ years of hands-on ML experience, ideally in robotics

• Strong Python and PyTorch

• Experience with imitation learning, reinforcement learning or foundation models for robotics

• You've shipped models onto real hardware, not just in research

• You're comfortable with the pace and ownership of an early-stage team

Nice to have

• Experience with Isaac Sim, MuJoCo or similar simulators

• A background in manipulation or mobile robots

• Published work in robot learning