{"id":1262629,"url":"https://alion.io/job/noblemachines-robotics-ml-engineer-simulation-and-robot-learning","title":"Robotics ML Engineer (Simulation and Robot Learning)","company":{"id":3782494,"name":"Noblemachines","domain":"noblemachines.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/noblemachines","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":4,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-09-27T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":null,"employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Sunnyvale, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":170000,"max":400000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":400000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"Human-in-the-Loop","optional":false},{"name":"Imitation Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Isaac Lab","optional":false},{"name":"Isaac Sim","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"MuJoCo","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch C++","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"robosuite","optional":false},{"name":"Sim-to-Real","optional":false},{"name":"Vision-Language-Action","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-10T17:25:03Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-21","last_verified_at":"2026-09-27T23:03:25Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":48,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":48},"description":"Robotics ML Engineer\nSimulation and Robot Learning | Noble Machines\nAdvance industrial autonomy by turning simulated experience into reliable real-world capability.\nAbout Noble Machines\nNoble Machines builds multipurpose robots to support human workers in the world's toughest jobs-turning dangerous work from a necessity into a choice. Our work demands reliability, robustness, and readiness for the unexpected-on time, every time. We're assembling a mission-driven team focused on delivering real impact in heavy industry, from construction and mining to energy. If you're driven to build rugged, reliable products that solve real-world problems, we'd love to talk.\nThe role\nYour defining contribution will be solving the sim-to-real challenge from the simulation side: understanding why policies succeed in simulation but fail on hardware, then improving the environments, data, and training conditions that determine transfer. You will build simulation into a dependable tool for developing industrial autonomy.\nYou will own the learning pipeline end to end, from simulation and data generation through policy training, evaluation, deployment, and iterative improvement on physical robots. The role calls for strong judgment about which aspects of simulation need greater fidelity, which need broader variation, and how to demonstrate that either change improves real-world performance.\nThis is a hands-on ML engineering role with research depth. You will work closely with AI, controls, hardware, and robot operations teammates, owning the learning loop while partnering on the robot, control interfaces, and deployment infrastructure.\nWhat you will do\nLead simulation-side sim-to-real development. Use hardware evidence to identify consequential gaps in visual observations, physics, contact, sensing, and control execution; improve simulation fidelity, calibration, and randomization to address them.\nBuild and maintain simulation environments and data-generation pipelines for robot learning. Design representative tasks, variations, and evaluation conditions, and ensure generated data is suitable for training transferable policies.\nTrain and adapt vision-language-action (VLA) policies, world-action models (WAMs), and other visuomotor policies using simulated and real robot data. Build reproducible experiments and make informed choices about data quality, coverage, and training methods.\nClose the learning loop between simulation and hardware: analyze failures, collect corrective data, retrain, and validate improvements. Apply DAgger-style data aggregation and human-in-the-loop learning where appropriate.\nUse imitation learning and reinforcement learning to improve policy performance, including RL fine-tuning and learning from real-world experience where appropriate.\nDesign controlled experiments that isolate transfer bottlenecks and distinguish simulator limitations from data, policy, and integration issues. Prioritize simulation improvements by their measured effect on hardware.\nDevelop repeatable evaluation and regression tests for robustness and generalization. Establish how well simulation results predict hardware performance, and investigate discrepancies.\nDeploy, profile, and debug learned policies on robot compute. Improve inference efficiency and reliability, and work with controls and systems teammates to integrate policies with the robot.\nOwn data and experiment quality across the pipeline, including curation, versioning, reproducibility, and clear reporting of results.\nWhat we are looking for\nDemonstrated ability to improve sim-to-real transfer by changing the simulation, data-generation process, or training distribution. You can identify the gap, explain your intervention, and show its effect on physical robot performance.\nHands-on experience training or adapting VLA policies, WAMs, language-conditioned manipulation policies, or other visuomotor policies, with strong practical understanding of imitation learning and reinforcement learning.\nExperience building simulation environments or demonstration-generation pipelines for robot learning using tools such as Isaac Sim / Isaac Lab, MuJoCo, robosuite, or comparable systems.\nSubstantial ownership of a robot-learning pipeline across data, training, evaluation, and hardware deployment (bonus), with evidence of diagnosing failures and improving results.\nStrong Python and PyTorch skills, with the engineering discipline to build reproducible training, dataset, and evaluation workflows. Comfortable working with robotics software and reading or modifying C++ when needed.\nPractical understanding of robot kinematics, coordinate frames, camera calibration, control interfaces, and the ways embodiment affects learning and transfer.\nA PhD, MS, or equivalent hands-on experience in robotics, machine learning, computer science, or a related field. Doctoral research and substantial open-source work count as relevant experience.\nEspecially relevant experience\nExperience training or adapting VLA policies or world-action models (WAMs) in simulation and evaluating their transfer to physical robots.\nDAgger, intervention-based data collection, offline RL, online RL, or RL fine-tuning of pretrained robot policies.\nBimanual manipulation, mobile manipulation, humanoid task execution, contact-rich tasks, or long-horizon behavior with autonomous recovery.\nDistributed training, high-throughput simulation and rendering, or inference optimization on embedded and edge GPUs.\nCalifornia Pay Transparency Statement\nPay Transparency & Compensation In accordance with California’s Pay Transparency Act (SB 1162), the expected base salary range for this position located in Sunnyvale, CA is $170,000 - $400,000, in addition to bonus, equity, and benefits.\nActual compensation within this range will be determined based on several factors, including the candidate’s qualifications, relevant experience, technical skills, and specialized expertise. Base salary is just one component of Noble Machines’ total rewards package, which may also include equity options, comprehensive healthcare benefits, retirement plan contributions, and performance-based incentives.\nEqual Opportunity Employer\nNoble Machines is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All employment decisions are based on business needs, job requirements, and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran status, disability status, or any other status protected by applicable federal, state, or local laws.\nHow to apply\nShare your resume and up to two representative projects, papers, codebases, or robot demonstrations. Describe the parts of the pipeline you owned, a sim-to-real failure you investigated, the simulation or training changes you made, and the resulting hardware performance. We value demonstrated ownership and measurable results from both research and industry.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7017,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"phd","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Retirement plans"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":[],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-25T21:04:59Z"}],"liveness":{"score":14,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.387,"p_room":0.35,"age_days":47,"expected_fill_days":21,"reasons":["conf:12","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-09-27T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":400000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/noblemachines-robotics-ml-engineer-simulation-and-robot-learning","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/noblemachines-robotics-ml-engineer-simulation-and-robot-learning.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-09-28T01:11:00Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":713,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":4287,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-09-29T00:00:00Z"}}}