Robotics Engineer - Manipulation focus
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 9, 2026. First seen by Alion on Sep 9, 2026. Generalrobotics scores A on the Alion truth index.
About this Role
We're hiring Robotics Engineers to bring state-of-the-art manipulation methods into the GRID platform. You'll work at the frontier of autonomous manipulation, building production-grade policies that generalize across embodiments - from fixed-base robotic arms and mobile manipulators to humanoids. This is a role for engineers who want their research to ship. You'll move between training runs, simulation, and real hardware in customer environments.
Responsibilities
Design methods, tools, and infrastructure to push forward the state of the art in robotics and foundation models.
Define research goals informed by practical engineering concerns.
Train, adapt, and deploy manipulation foundation models - vision-language-action (VLA) policies, world action models (WAMs), reinforcement learning, and agentic robot policies.
Build synthetic data generation pipelines on high-fidelity simulation platforms, and drive sim-to-real transfer.
Develop data collection, training, and evaluation pipelines as production-quality code: extensible, well-documented, and usable by engineers outside your team.
Run experiments end to end - experimental design, reusable implementations, model evaluation, and clear reporting of results.
Contribute to publications and open-source releases.
Partner with customers to take manipulation capabilities from prototype to deployed product.
Minimum Qualifications
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, relevant technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
Research experience in machine learning, robotics, and computer vision.
Experience with developing robotics algorithms or machine learning models at scale.
Programming experience in Python/C++. Good understanding of deep learning frameworks like Pytorch or Jax.
Must obtain work authorization in the country of employment at the time of hire, and maintain ongoing work authorization during employment.
Desired Qualifications
MS or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field.
Direct research experience in robot learning, computer vision, or machine learning.
First-author publications at peer-reviewed AI and robotics venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICRA, IROS, CoRL).
Hands-on experience with modern manipulation policies - VLAs, world action models, reinforcement learning, imitation learning, diffusion or flow-matching policies, or agentic robot policies.
Experience with high-fidelity simulators such as NVIDIA Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, ManiSkill, AirSim, or CARLA, including domain randomization and sim-to-real workflows.
Familiarity with modern perception stacks and sensing modalities: RGB and RGB-D cameras, LiDAR, 3D representations (point clouds, meshes), and segmentation, detection, and tracking.
Judgment about systems constraints - latency, throughput, compute budget, memory - and the ability to factor them into model and architecture choices.
About General Robotics
General Robotics is building the intelligence grid for physical AI - the platform that makes any robot, from robotic arms to humanoids, genuinely intelligent. Headquartered in Redmond, Washington, we're venture backed, including by Accenture, who invested in General Robotics in 2026 to advance Physical AI-powered robotics in manufacturing and logistics, and we're also part of Microsoft's Startups Pegasus Program. Our team's work spans some of the most widely adopted robotics and AI research to come out of Microsoft Research, Google Research and DeepMind - including AirSim, PACT, ClimaX, Tensorflow Object Detection and VideoPoet.
Work Authorization
This role is open to candidates currently based in and authorized to work in the US.
Equal Opportunity Employer
General Robotics is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the
basis of any status protected by applicable law.
Accommodations
If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or interview
process, please contact: [email protected]