{"id":833458,"url":"https://alion.io/job/roboforce-senior-staff-ai-research-engineer-data-infrastructure","title":"Senior / Staff AI Research Engineer, Data Infrastructure","company":{"id":686554,"name":"RoboForce","domain":"roboforce.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/roboforce","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"is_intermediary":false,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"C","score":55,"open_postings":16,"ghost_share":0.75,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-09-23T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Milpitas, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":185000,"max":325000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":325000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"Amazon S3","optional":false},{"name":"DPO","optional":false},{"name":"ETL/ELT","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"Human-in-the-Loop","optional":false},{"name":"Imitation Learning","optional":false},{"name":"JAX","optional":false},{"name":"MLFlow","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Physical AI","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"PPO","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Reward Modeling","optional":false},{"name":"SFT","optional":false},{"name":"Teleoperation","optional":false},{"name":"Vision-Language-Action","optional":false},{"name":"VLM","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2025-12-11T06:41:30Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-07","last_verified_at":"2026-09-23T09:22:27Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":286,"trust":{"level":"ghost","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale","company_stale"],"days_open":285},"description":"Why RoboForce\nRoboForce is an AI robotics company developing Physical AI-powered Robo-Labor for dull, dirty, and dangerous work. The company's robots are engineered for demanding industrial environments, with a focus on real-world deployment and scalability.\nWe are looking for a Senior / Staff AI Research Engineer, Data Infrastructure to build the data and learning engine behind RoboForce's Physical AI stack. In this role, you will own the full pipeline - from raw teleoperation and UMI device data collection through curation, annotation, and storage, to post-training infrastructure that scores demonstrations, identifies failure patterns, and closes the loop back into model retraining.\nResponsibilities\nDesign and maintain end-to-end data collection pipelines ingesting multimodal demonstration data from teleoperation devices and UMI hardware, including synchronization, versioning, and distributed storage at scale.\n\nBuild annotation tooling and data curation workflows - quality filtering, deduplication, episode scoring, and domain reweighting - to produce high-quality training datasets for robot policy learning.\n\nDevelop post-SFT reinforcement learning infrastructure: implement reward scoring on demonstrations, mine and categorize failure patterns, and feed curated failure data back into the retraining loop.\n\nBuild evaluation and test infrastructure to log policy rollouts on-robot, capture structured results, and surface actionable diagnostics for the research team.\n\nCollaborate with ML researchers to define data schemas, episode formats, and pipeline interfaces that support rapid iteration on VLA and manipulation policy training.\n\nArchitect scalable storage and retrieval systems for heterogeneous robot data (vision, proprioception, action, language) across both cloud and on-prem environments.\n\nRequirements\nBachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Robotics, or related field with 5+ years of experience.\n\nStrong proficiency in Python and experience building production-grade data pipelines and ETL systems.\n\nHands-on experience with large-scale dataset management, including versioning, deduplication, quality filtering, and distributed storage (e.g., S3, GCS, HDF5, WebDataset, Zarr).\n\nExperience building or working with post-training infrastructure - SFT pipelines, reward modeling, or RL training loops (e.g., PPO, DPO, rejection sampling).\n\nFamiliarity with deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, JAX) and ML training workflows sufficient to collaborate tightly with research teams.\n\nRequires 5 days/week in-office collaboration with the teams.\n\nBonus Qualifications\nExperience with robotics data collection hardware - teleoperation devices, UMI, GELLO, or similar - and the synchronization and preprocessing challenges they introduce.\n\nFamiliarity with robot learning pipelines: imitation learning, behavior cloning, or VLA/VLM fine-tuning workflows.\n\nExperience building evaluation or experiment tracking infrastructure (e.g., Weights & Biases, MLflow, custom rollout loggers).\n\nProven ability to design annotation tooling or human-in-the-loop labeling systems for structured or multimodal data.\n\nBenefits\nCompetitive stock options/equity programs.\n\nHealth, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k) plan.\n\nVisa sponsorship and green card support for qualified candidates.\n\nLunches and dinners, a fully stocked kitchen, and regular team-building events.\n\nCompensation: Salary $185,000-$325,000 USD + Bonus + Equity\nThe base salary range above represents the expected compensation for this full-time U.S. position. Final compensation will be determined based on role scope, level, location, job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training, and may fall outside the listed range in exceptional cases.","description_format":"text","description_chars":3754,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Stock options","Vision insurance"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Robotics"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-12T17:41:26Z"}],"liveness":{"score":4,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.138,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":285,"expected_fill_days":53,"reasons":["conf:8","stale_co","ghost","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-09-23T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":325000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/roboforce-senior-staff-ai-research-engineer-data-infrastructure","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/roboforce-senior-staff-ai-research-engineer-data-infrastructure.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-09-23T18:56:30Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers"}}