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Robot Learning Researcher (VLA / Foundation Models)

Aktoria Robotics

San Francisco, CAFull-time$200–400K/yrSeen 1mo agoStill listed today

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At a glance

Compensation
$200–400K/yr
Location
San Francisco, CA
Schedule
Full-time
Work Authorization
Not specified

Olive lists jobs from US employers, including remote roles you can work from the United States.

Job overview

The researcher will train and fine‑tune visual‑language agents and robot foundation models, run data‑quality ablations and scaling studies, publish papers and benchmarks, and handle data curation, filtering, formats, and evaluations on real robots.

Skills & qualifications

RequiredNice to have

Skills

Training IL/VLA Policies at ScaleData CurationData FilteringData Evaluation

Qualifications

First‑Author Publications in Top Conferences or Equivalent Open‑Source Work

Full job description

  • Train / fine-tune VLAs and robot foundation models

  • Run data-quality ablations and scaling studies

  • Publish papers and benchmarks

  • data curation, filtering, formats, evals on real robots expected to have:

  • experience training IL/VLA policies at scale

  • First-author publications (CoRL/ICRA/IROS/RSS/NeurIPS) or equivalent strong open-source work

How this job compares

Set against the 4,921 open Researcher jobs on Olive Jobs, counted October 29, 2026.

Pay
  • This posting$200–400K/yr
  • California median$150–230K/yr465 salary ranges
  • US median$100–148K/yr2,271 salary ranges

This range's midpoint, $300K, is 51% above the California median midpoint ($199K) — in the top quarter of Researcher salary ranges in California.

Openings
Olive Jobs lists 795 open Researcher jobs in California and 4,921 across the US. 2% of them nationwide are listed as remote or flexible.
Hiring the most in California
Experience
This posting asks for no prior experience — less than three in four Researcher postings that state a minimum ask for (median 4 years, across 1,648 postings).
Education
3,332 of the 4,921 open Researcher jobs (68%) ask for a bachelor's degree or higher.

Counted across the open, public US postings on Olive Jobs on October 29, 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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