Senior AI Software Engineer, Reinforcement Learning

About the Role

The AI Controls team builds high-rate learned controllers that let Digit move robustly, efficiently, and safely in dynamic environments. As an AI Controls Engineer, you'll develop and deploy reinforcement learning policies across humanoid locomotion, whole-body control, and manipulation—integrating perception to enable collision-free, perceptive motion in the real world.

About the Work

• Design, train, and deploy robust RL policies for locomotion, manipulation, whole body control, and dynamic interactions with the environment.
• Integrate perception into RL policies to achieve obstacle-aware, collision-free motion, and perceptive manipulation.
• Develop and maintain core RL infrastructure, including scalable training pipelines and evaluation frameworks.
• Design and implement new simulation environments and tasks to support training and evaluation of control policies.
• Collaborate with on-robot software and deployment teams to ship production-quality policies to Digit.

About You

• 4+ years of experience developing and deploying RL policies for robotics applications.
• Strong Python skills and hands-on experience with a deep learning framework such as PyTorch.
• Experience designing reward functions, tuning hyperparameters, and implementing exploration strategies to solve complex control tasks.
• Experience with perception-in-the-loop control, integrating real-time sensory inputs for reactive or adaptive behaviors.
• Proven experience deploying reinforcement learning policies on real-world bipedal or quadrupedal robots.
• Familiarity with robot simulation environments (e.g. Mujoco-Warp, Isaac) and sim-to-real transfer.
• A collaborative approach and the ability to deliver safe, high-quality software in a fast-paced environment.

Bonus Qualifications

• Advanced degree (MS or PhD) in Robotics, Computer Science, or a related field.
• Experience with contact-rich manipulation, including force-torque or tactile sensing.
• Familiarity with policy distillation (e.g. teacher–student) for transferring state-based policies to perception-driven ones.
• Publications in top ML or robotics conferences (e.g. NeurIPS, ICML, CoRL, RSS, ICRA).

Pay

Anticipated Salary Range: $187,000—$292,000 USD

Benefits

• 401(k) Plan: Includes a 6% company match.
• Equity: Company stock options.
• Insurance Coverage: 100% company-paid medical, dental, vision, and short/long-term disability insurance for employees.
• Benefit Start Date: Eligible for benefits on your first day of employment.
• Well-Being Support: Employee Assistance Program (EAP).
• Time Off: Exempt Employees: Flexible, unlimited PTO and 12 company holidays, including a winter shutdown. Non-Exempt Employees: 10 vacation days, paid sick leave, and 12 company holidays, including a winter shutdown, annually.
• On-Site Perks: Catered lunches four times a week and a variety of healthy snacks and refreshments at our Salem and Pittsburgh locations.
• Parental Leave: Generous paid parental leave programs.
• Work Environment: A culture that supports flexible work arrangements.
• Growth Opportunities: Professional development and tuition reimbursement programs.
• Relocation Assistance: Provided for eligible roles.
• Annual Discretionary Bonus: Provided for eligible roles.

Schedule

This is a hybrid position based out of one of our Salem, Pittsburgh, or Fremont offices.