About the role
About Astera
Astera Institute is a private foundation supporting ambitious work in science and technology through grants, investments, and in-house research. Its research programs combine the pace and autonomy of a startup with the freedom to pursue difficult scientific questions. Learn more about Astera’s mission at astera.org/vision.
About the Robotics Lab
We are building a frontier robotics lab at Astera Institute. We believe neuroscience and AI will converge in embodied intelligence: animals and robots face shared challenges of perceiving their surroundings, navigating, manipulating objects, and using memory and reasoning to accomplish tasks in the physical world. Robotics provides a powerful testbed for investigating how biological neural circuits solve these challenges and for developing AI systems that turn perception, learning, and cognition into effective action.
Our strategy starts with making robots useful, while developing a mechanistic understanding of how neural circuits can generate intelligent behavior. We aim to continually expand the repertoire of behaviors a robot can perform reliably in real environments, while improving its ability to learn new skills, adapt to changing conditions, and recover from failure. These practical capabilities provide both measurable outcomes and a foundation for investigating deeper principles of intelligence.
Position Summary
We are looking for an engineer who can take a learning-based robotics system from model development to reliable operation on a physical robot. You will work across perception, policy learning, inference, and robot integration, connecting what a model predicts to what a robot actually does.
This is a hands-on engineering role in our Robotics Lab in Emeryville, California. You will work closely with researchers and hardware engineers to develop manipulation capabilities, investigate failures on real robots, and improve the software and models together.
Core Responsibilities
- Develop models for robotic manipulation. Fine-tune and evaluate vision and action models for robotic manipulation, using pretrained models and robot data.
- Connect perception to action. Build the software that connects cameras and other sensors to model inference and robot commands, including calibration, coordinate transforms, action representations, and control interfaces.
- Optimize models for deployment. Deploy models on robot hardware and optimize inference latency, memory use, and throughput through profiling, distillation, compilation, and precision changes.
- Build responsive policy execution. Implement responsive policy execution, including asynchronous inference and action chunking where appropriate.
- Diagnose failures across the stack. Debug failures across the full system—from observations and model outputs to middleware and physical motion—and build logging, replay, and evaluation tools to understand them.
- Build reusable robot software. Package robot capabilities with clear interfaces, reproducible configurations, and tests so other team members can use and extend them.
Desired Qualifications
- Machine learning engineering. Strong Python skills and practical experience training or fine-tuning models in PyTorch or a comparable framework.
- Physical robot integration. Experience integrating learning or perception systems with physical robots, including coordinate frames, sensor calibration, and action or control interfaces.
- Systems debugging and optimization. Ability to profile software, identify runtime bottlenecks, and debug problems that span models, robotics software, and hardware.
- Practical engineering experience. A record of building working systems and evaluating them on real tasks, with a clear understanding of your own technical contributions.
- Technical collaboration. Comfort working closely with researchers and engineers, making practical tradeoffs, and iterating from experimental results.
- Robot learning experience. Robot learning frameworks such as LeRobot or openpi, imitation learning, or vision-language-action models. Helpful, but not required.
- Inference optimization experience. Model distillation and inference optimization with tools such as ONNX or TensorRT. Helpful, but not required.
- Manipulation and policy execution experience. Dexterous or contact-rich manipulation, asynchronous policy execution, or reusable robot skill interfaces. Helpful, but not required.
Why Join Us?
Work on both sides of embodied AI: improve the models and build the systems that turn their outputs into useful behavior on physical robots. You will contribute across model development, deployment, and robot integration, with direct access to the physical systems your software controls.
You will work alongside robotics researchers, AI engineers, and neuroscientists in a lab that connects practical robot capabilities with deeper questions about learning and intelligence. The role offers broad technical ownership and close collaboration across disciplines.