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Research Engineer, Robotics & Embodied AI

Meta

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At a glance

Compensation
No compensation found
Location
United States
Work Authorization
Not specified

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Requirements

Credentials this posting asks for.

Doctorate

Job overview

Meta Reality Labs Research is building foundation models for robotic manipulation and seeks a Research Engineer to bring them onto real hardware. The role spans the robotics stack, including hardware bring-up, teleoperation, data collection, and running learned policies on robots. The engineer will build prototypes with research teams, run experiments, and investigate challenges that arise when models act in the physical world.

Skills & qualifications

RequiredNice to have

Skills

Robot Platform OperationRobot Platform MaintenancePolicy DeploymentOn-Robot OptimizationExperiment DesignHardware DebuggingPerceptionData DebuggingPrototype DevelopmentExperiment ToolingResearch PublicationPythonPyTorchOpen-Source Robot Learning3D Generative ModelsWorld ModelsTeleoperationRobot Data CollectionPolicy Failure DebuggingLong-Horizon Planning3D Computer Vision3D ReconstructionPose EstimationScene UnderstandingContact-Rich ManipulationForce FeedbackTactile FeedbackVision-Language-Action ModelsWorld Action ModelsROSROS 2KinematicsCamera-to-Robot Calibration

Qualifications

PhD in Robotics, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, or Related FieldIndustry Experience With General-Purpose Robot PlatformsRobot Platform Bring-Up ExperienceLearned Policy Deployment ExperienceFirst-Author Publications or Open-Source Contributions

Full job description

Summary:

Meta Reality Labs Research (RL Research) is a team of researchers and engineers pushing the frontier of AI, robotics, and AR/VR technology. Within RL Research, our team is building the next generation of foundation models (VLAs, WAMs) for robotic manipulation. We are looking for a skilled Research Engineer to take those models onto real hardware in our lab.This role covers the full robotics stack: hardware bring-up, teleoperation, data collection, and running learned policies on real robots. It involves building prototypes together with research scientists and engineers, running the experiments that show whether they work, and finding the problems that only appear once a model has to act in the physical world.

Required Skills:

Research Engineer, Robotics & Embodied AI Responsibilities:

  1. Build, operate, and maintain robot platforms for teleoperation and deployment

  2. Deploy learned policies on real robots and optimize their performance on-robot

  3. Work with researchers to design experiments and measure how well policies work on real hardware

  4. Debug failures across hardware, perception, data, and policies

  5. Turn research results into working prototypes

  6. Build tooling that makes experiments repeatable

  7. Publish research results in top conferences and release code that contributes to the field of robotics

Minimum Qualifications:

Minimum Qualifications:

  1. Currently has, or is in the process of obtaining, a PhD degree in robotics, computer vision, machine learning, or a related field

  2. Industry experience with modern, general-purpose robot platforms

  3. Hands-on experience bringing up, calibrating, and debugging a new robot platform from scratch

  4. Experience running learned policies on real robots and improving their performance

  5. First-author publications at ICRA, CoRL, RSS, IROS, or CVPR, or widely used open-source contributions

  6. Proficient in Python and PyTorch

Preferred Qualifications:

Preferred Qualifications:

  1. Contributed to open-source robot learning projects such as LeRobot, robosuite, or ManiSkill

  2. Trained or evaluated large 3D generative or world models

  3. Built teleoperation rigs and used them to collect robot data at scale

  4. Debugged policy failures across hardware, data, training, and simulation

  5. Worked on long-horizon planning for robots

  6. Worked on 3D computer vision for robots, such as reconstruction, pose estimation, or scene understanding

  7. Worked on contact-rich manipulation, including force or tactile feedback

  8. Trained or fine-tuned vision-language-action models or world action models

  9. Fluent in ROS or ROS 2, including kinematics and camera-to-robot calibration

Industry: Internet

How this job compares

Set against the 1,187 open Research Engineer jobs on Olive Jobs, counted October 31, 2026.

Pay
  • This postingNot listed
  • US median$149–261K/yr864 salary ranges
Openings
Olive Jobs lists 1,187 open Research Engineer jobs across the US. 6% of them nationwide are listed as remote or flexible.
Hiring the most across the US
Experience
Research Engineer postings that state a minimum ask for 3 years of experience at the median; the middle half ask for 2 to 5 years (673 postings).
Education
This posting asks for a doctorate or professional degree; 74 of the 1,187 open Research Engineer jobs (6%) ask for a doctorate or professional degree.

Counted across the open, public US postings on Olive Jobs on October 31, 2026. Pay medians are the middle values of the low ends and of the high ends of postings that list both ends of a range in the same cadence (a yearly salary or an hourly rate); a range's midpoint is halfway between its ends. Pay and experience figures resting on fewer than 20 postings are left out.

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