{"id":2921961,"url":"https://alion.io/job/haptica-robotics-founding-robot-learning-engineer","title":"Founding Robot Learning Engineer","company":{"id":4400124,"name":"Haptica Robotics","domain":"hapticarobotics.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/haptica-robotics","size_band":"1-10","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"Robotics","role_family":"Robotics","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":133000,"max_usd":320000,"period":"year","method":"role_country_seniority_unknown","sample_n":559},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Diffusion Policy","optional":false},{"name":"Imitation Learning","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"Teleoperation","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-14T03:06:43Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-14","last_verified_at":"2026-10-25T14:37:17Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":41,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":41},"description":"ABOUT HAPTICA\nHaptica is building the standard for tactile in robotics.\nWe build pneumatic-based tactile sensing wearables for robots and people. Gloves and sensors that integrate across grippers, human hands, and robot hands. Teleop teams use Haptica to give human operators low-latency haptic feedback that replicates the pressure that robots put on an object. Data ops teams use Haptica to collect UMI, egocentric, and teleop data to train their models.\nHaptica was founded by Dr. Cosima du Pasquier and Paola Peraza Calderon in early 2026 and is backed by top tier investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners, Leitmotif, NVP Capital, and Sarah Smith Fund. Haptica’s advisors include famed roboticist Rodney Brooks, Benchmark Capital co-founder Andy Rachleff, and haptics expert Allison Okamura.\nWe’re a small and mighty team of builders driven to unlock touch as the new frontier. The next 6 months for us are all about building high quality hardware, quantifiably establishing the impact of tactile data on learning policies, and hiring A-players that can help us scale in 2027.\nABOUT THE ROLE\nWe’re looking for a Robot Learning Engineer to own the entire function at Haptica. We do not deploy robots, but we need to have in-house training capabilities to measure our effectiveness.\nThis includes creating our training pipeline, stress-testing our sensors, determining what data to collect and how, evaluating policies on the robot, and helping customers integrate our data into their stack. You’ll have extreme autonomy, but you won’t need to start from scratch. We have a Franka FR3 arm in the office, basic glove-based hand-tracking, and have laid the groundwork to train our own policies. We just need someone to take it further.\nThe sky is the limit for this role, but to start we have three broad goals:\nBuild our internal data collection pipeline alongside our hardware team\n\nDrive and publish research to establish the role of tactile data in learning\n\nInform the roadmap for how our customers will use our data in their stack\n\nWHAT YOU’LL DO\nBuild our data collection, training and inference pipeline on off-the-shelf hardware integrated with Haptica.\n\nTrain imitation learning policies (ACT, diffusion policy) with and without our tactile data on tasks where touch matters most: shear, occluded grasps, delicate objects.\n\nDefine how we evaluate. Benchmark tasks that reuse publicly researched setups, metrics, and tooling to quantify the impact of our data and the variance of the impact across tasks.\n\nExtend data collection from teleop to egocentric glove data. Integrate hand tracking, test retargeting from a human hand to grippers and multi fingered hands, and run experiments that decide how many fingers we track.\n\nInfluence hardware decisions based on what our sensing needs to deliver for learning. You'll have opinions on sampling rate, resolution, synchronization, drift, and calibration.\n\nStay on the bleeding edge of how the world's best companies are running robot learning, and help us integrate Haptica into customers' data collection and teleoperation setup.\n\nShare your findings with the world through demo videos, writeups, and papers with our academic collaborators at Stanford, MIT, and more.\n\nWHO YOU ARE\nYou have a MS or PhD in robotics, CS, EE or a related field, or equivalent industry experience.\n\nExtensive experience in production-level software and ML engineering best practices.\n\nExperience with modern deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch).\n\nYou're an outstandingly strong written and verbal communicator skilled at simplifying complex topics to teammates, customers, investors, and friends. You make it look easy.\n\nYou know the fundamentals for running imitation learning (diffusion policy, ACT or similar) from data collection to training, deployment, and debugging.\n\nYou're comfortable with hardware. You've worked with cameras, IMUs, calibration, time synchronization across sensors. You have an intuition for hardware decisions that matter.\n\nYou're comfortable with ambiguity, and get excited at the thought of building from scratch, defining your own constraints, and closely partnering with both internal and external teams.\n\nBONUS IF\nYou have experience with dexterous manipulation, multi-fingered hands, or retargeting\n\nYou're passionate about tactile and have relevant research or experience in sensing\n\nYou have experience taking egocentric or wearable data through to a trained policy\n\nYou have a strong publication record in a relevant field\n\nPrior work on humanoids or highly dexterous robotic platforms","description_format":"text","description_chars":4569,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"master","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":[],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-20T12:24:55Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":18,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.391,"p_room":0.45,"age_days":41,"expected_fill_days":25,"reasons":["conf:2","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-10-25T05:49:26Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/haptica-robotics-founding-robot-learning-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/haptica-robotics-founding-robot-learning-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-25T14:57:18Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":21568,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-26T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":4400124},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=4400124"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fhaptica-robotics-founding-robot-learning-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fhaptica-robotics-founding-robot-learning-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fhaptica-robotics-founding-robot-learning-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/haptica-robotics-founding-robot-learning-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fhaptica-robotics-founding-robot-learning-engineer"}]}