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Research Scientist / Engineer - Robot Learning Data

Rhoda AI
Posted 24 days ago, valid for 20 days
Location

Palo Alto, CA 94301, US

Salary

Competitive

Contract type

Full Time

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Sonic Summary

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  • Rhoda AI is seeking a Research Scientist or Research Engineer with hands-on experience in robotic data collection and a strong software engineering background.
  • The role involves designing teleoperation systems, developing data quality metrics, and collaborating with teams to enhance model performance through high-quality learning data.
  • Candidates should have experience working with real robotic hardware and an understanding of the factors that contribute to useful robot learning data.
  • A PhD or strong research background in robotics or machine learning is preferred, but not required.
  • The position offers a competitive salary, with specific compensation details not disclosed, and requires a minimum of 3 years of relevant experience.

At Rhoda AI, we’re building the next generation of generalist intelligent robots. We own the full robotics stack from high-performance hardware and robot systems to the infrastructure and state-of-the-art foundation world models that control our robots. Our robots are designed to be generalists capable of operating in complex, real-world environments and handling long-tail edge cases, made possible by our cutting edge research and end-to-end system design. We've raised over $400M and are investing aggressively in model research, infrastructure, hardware development, and manufacturing scale-up to make generalist robotics a reality.

We're looking for a Research Scientist or Research Engineer to own the strategy and systems for collecting, curating, and scaling high-quality robot learning data. This role sits at the intersection of robotics, data collection, and research — your work directly determines the diversity and quality of the demonstrations our models train on.

What You'll Do

  • Design and implement teleoperation and demonstration collection systems for high-quality robot learning data

  • Develop data quality metrics, curation pipelines, and filtering strategies specific to robotic interaction data

  • Research methods to augment real robot data with synthetic, simulated, or cross-embodiment sources

  • Identify and source external robotic datasets to expand training diversity across platforms and tasks

  • Build tooling for researchers to explore, annotate, and iterate on robotic datasets

  • Collaborate with pre-training and post-training teams to translate model data needs into concrete collection strategies

  • Measure the downstream impact of data collection decisions on model and policy performance

What We're Looking For

  • Hands-on experience with robotic data collection, teleoperation systems, or demonstration frameworks

  • Understanding of what makes robot learning data useful: diversity, coverage, temporal quality, and action fidelity

  • Strong software engineering skills for building reliable data collection and processing systems

  • Ability to reason across hardware, pipelines, and model performance

  • Experience working with real robotic hardware in a research or industrial setting

Nice to Have (But Not Required)

  • Experience with sim-to-real transfer and synthetic data generation for robotics

  • Familiarity with cross-embodiment datasets (e.g., Open X-Embodiment, DROID)

  • Experience with VR teleoperation, motion capture, or dexterous demonstration collection

  • Understanding of imitation learning and how data properties affect policy generalization

  • PhD or strong research background in robotics or ML

Why This Role

  • The data you collect and curate is the direct upstream dependency for all model quality

  • Unique leverage: improvements to data quality compound across every training run

  • Work across hardware, systems, and research in a way few roles allow

  • Direct feedback loop with both robot operators and research scientists to continuously improve data quality




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