Research Scientist, RL for Dexterous Manipulation, Atlas
Boston Dynamics · United States · 4mo ago
Are you passionate about using reinforcement learning to solve dexterous manipulation tasks? As an RL Research Scientist, you'll lead research projects on visual sim-to-real transfer and post-training of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. Your job is to turn unlabeled data from simulation or the real-world into robust real-world manipulation skills. You should push the frontier of what bimanual and multi-fingered systems can do in unstructured environments.
In this role, you will:
Develop novel algorithms for visual sim-to-real transfer with photorealistic rendering
Design post-training recipes that improve pretrained VLA models on manipulation tasks
Research reward modeling, and offline-to-online RL for large multimodal policies
Close the sim-2-real gap through tactile sensing, vision, and system identification
Train policies that generalize across objects, scenes, and embodiments
Required Qualifications:
PhD, in ML, Robotics, or a related field or a MS with 3+ years of experience
Track record of first-author publications at top venues (CoRL, RSS, ICLR, NeuRIPS)
Demonstrated experience training policies for dexterous or contact-rich manipulation
Hands-on experience with VLA models, diffusion policies, or large behavior models
Proficient in PyTorch and/or JAX, with experience training models at scale
Strong software fundamentals and the ability to ship research code that runs reliably
The ideal candidate has:
Deployed vision-based manipulation policies on physical robots
Deep knowledge of sim-to-real transfer techniques and photorealistic rendering
Built training pipelines that combine RL, imitation learning, and large-scale pretraining
Experience fine-tuning foundation models with RLHF, DPO, GRPO, or related methods
Familiarity with tactile sensing, multi-fingered hands, or bimanual coordination
Why join us?
Direct impact on the policies powering our humanoid robots in the real world
Access to a world-class fleet of robots, simulation infrastructure, and compute
The chance to define what's possible for dexterous manipulation at scale
The pay range for this position is between $175,000 to $220,000 annually. Base pay will depend on multiple individualized factors including, but not limited to internal equity, job related knowledge, skills and experience. This range represents a good faith estimate of compensation at the time of posting. Boston Dynamics offers a generous Benefits package including medical, dental vision, 401(k), paid time off and a annual bonus structure. Additional details regarding these benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer for employment.
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