Research Engineer Robotics (Operations)

About the role

Reality Labs Research brings together a multidisciplinary and highly interdisciplinary team of researchers and engineers to create the future of dexterous robotic manipulation. We are seeking an experienced Robotics Operations Engineer to own and scale our real-robot operations infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Evaluate new robotic arms and hands and architect next-gen robot stations
• Own the end-to-end lifecycle of real robot stations — build-up, calibration, validation, maintenance, and teardown
• Operate and support teleoperation data collection campaigns
• Build and maintain pipelines for ingesting, validating, and organizing collected data to feed ML training workflows
• Deploy trained control policies on real robotic hardware
• Develop and maintain tools that improve robot operations reliability, performance, and ease of use
• Integrate new hardware and software components into existing robot stations
• Define and document playbooks, runbooks, and standard operating procedures for robot operations
• Partner with policy researchers, embodiment engineers, teleop engineers, and exoskeleton teams to plan and execute experiments on real robots
• Lead the bring-up and commissioning of new robot stations across sites

Qualifications

The minimum qualifications for this role include:

• Proficiency in Python, including experience writing production-quality scripts and automation tools, and experience with Linux systems administration
• Experience with ROS or ROS 2 in real-world robotic systems
• Hands-on experience building up, debugging, and maintaining physical robot systems
• Experience with containerization (Docker) and deployment automation tools
• Demonstrated ability to work autonomously, define priorities, and drive projects to completion with minimal direction
• Experience communicating cross-functionally to translate between research goals and engineering execution

Preferred qualifications include:

• Experience with motion capture systems, force/torque sensors, or tactile sensing hardware
• Experience scaling robot operations across multiple stations or sites
• Experience with dexterous manipulation systems, multi-fingered hands, or humanoid robots
• Demonstrated ability to integrate AI tools to optimize/redesign workflows and drive measurable impact
• Experience adhering to and implementing responsible, ethical AI practices
• Experience with ML training pipelines or ML Ops workflows
• Master's degree in Robotics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related field
• Demonstrated ongoing AI skill development and staying current with emerging AI technologies
• Proficiency in C++ in addition to Python
• Experience with real-time control systems, including RTOS and hardware time synchronization

Pay

The salary for this role is $154,003/year to $217,000/year, plus bonus, equity, and benefits.