Research Engineer, Robotics (PhD)

The Surreal Team at Meta’s Reality Lab Research is a multi-disciplinary, vertically integrated R&D group. Our expertise spans a wide range, from hardware prototyping and software/hardware co-design to comprehensive end-to-end system integration, enhancing the overall end-user experience. We specialize in an array of cutting-edge technologies in ego-centric machine perception and robotics AI including areas such as transfer learning, learning from demonstration, reinforcement learning, perception, representation learning, robot control, navigation, mobile manipulation, dexterous manipulation, vision-language models, and contextually aware AI. The research and development work spans across data collection / generation, algorithm development and end-to-end deployment onto robot platforms.Research Engineer, Robotics (PhD) Responsibilities

• Build data collection/generation platforms and develop algorithms based on state-of-the-art machine learning and neural network methodologies.
• Build end-to-end applications for robotics tasks such as navigation, dexterous manipulation, whole-body control, long-horizon reasoning, etc.
• Invent/improve novel data-driven paradigms for robotics intelligence, including AR, VR, and robotics, leveraging a variety of modalities (images, video, text, audio, tactile, etc).
• Investigate paradigms that can deliver a spectrum of robotics behaviors - from simulated characters to real robots, and from short-horizon, low-level to long-horizon, high-level intelligence.
• Define, build and benchmark new algorithms needed for the next generation of AI.

Minimum Qualifications

• Research experience in robotics, motion planning, embodied AI, human-robot interaction, sim-to-real transfer, learning from demonstration, reinforcement learning, dexterous manipulation.
• Experience in C/C++ and Python.
• Experience with deep learning frameworks: pytorch or tensorflow.
• Must obtain work authorization in the country of employment at the time of hire and maintain ongoing work authorization during employment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with robotics frameworks like Robot Operation System (ROS), along with experience working with robotic simulations and real-world robots.
• Experience with research and development for humanoid robots.
• Experience with research areas such as Vision Language Models, Egocentric Perception, Large Language Models and Natural Language Processing.
• Experience with manipulating and analyzing complex, large scale, high-dimensionality data from varying sources.
• Demonstrated research and software engineering experience via an internship, work experience, coding competitions, or widely used contributions in open source repositories (e.g. GitHub).
• Proven track record of achieving significant results as demonstrated by grants, fellowships, patents, as well as publications at leading workshops, journals or conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ICRA, IROS, RSS, CoRL, CVPR, ICCV and ECCV.
• Experience working and communicating cross functionally in a team environment.
• Experience solving complex problems and comparing alternative solutions, tradeoffs, and different points of view to determine a path forward.

For those who live in or expect to work from California if hired for this position, please click here for additional information. About Meta Meta builds technologies that help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses. When Facebook launched in 2004, it changed the way people connect. Apps like Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp further empowered billions around the world. Now, Meta is moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology. People who choose to build their careers by building with us at Meta help shape a future that will take us beyond what digital connection makes possible today—beyond the constraints of screens, the limits of distance, and even the rules of physics.
$56.25/hour to $173,000/year + bonus + equity + benefits

Individual compensation is determined by skills, qualifications, experience, and location. Compensation details listed in this posting reflect the base hourly rate, monthly rate, or annual salary only, and do not include bonus, equity or sales incentives, if applicable. In addition to base compensation, Meta offers benefits. Learn more about benefits at Meta.

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