Research Scientist
About the Role :
We’re looking for a Research Scientist to develop the intelligence behind LUME. You’ll work on learning-based methods that enable robots to understand their environment, manipulate everyday objects, learn new tasks, and become more capable over time. You’ll focus on advancing the state of the art in robot learning and work closely with our Robotics Engineers to deploy your research onto real robots operating in real homes.
What You'll Do :
Develop learning-based approaches for robotic manipulation and household tasks
Train and evaluate vision-language-action models, imitation learning policies, and reinforcement learning systems
Develop methods for generalization, adaptation, and learning new tasks from limited demonstrations
Work on perception, multimodal reasoning, and long-horizon task execution
Build data collection, training, evaluation, and experimentation pipelines
Work with Robotics Engineers to deploy learned policies onto physical robots
Design experiments and benchmarks that translate research progress into real-world robot capabilities
Stay at the frontier of robotics and machine learning research and rapidly bring promising ideas into LUME
Work flexible shifts including nights/weekends as needed
What We're Looking For :
PhD or equivalent research experience in robotics, machine learning, computer science, or a related field
Strong research background in robot learning, manipulation, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, world models or vision-language-action models
Strong Python and deep learning experience
Experience with PyTorch and modern ML training infrastructure
Experience training and evaluating models on real robotic systems
Strong understanding of current robotics and embodied AI research
Ability to turn research ideas into working systems, not just papers
Able to lead research with minimal guidance in a fast-moving environment
Communicates clearly and concisely
From a top 20 global university
Nice to Have :
Publications at top robotics or ML venues such as CoRL, RSS, ICRA, IROS, NeurIPS, ICML, or CVPR
Experience with VLA/VLM models, diffusion policies, foundation models, or large-scale imitation learning
Experience with dexterous or general-purpose manipulation
Experience with teleoperation, demonstration collection, and large-scale robotics datasets
Experience with sim-to-real, domain adaptation, or few-shot/in-context robot learning
Experience adapting foundation models to new tasks, environments, or robot embodiments
Obsessed with thoughtful design; can point to a product that “sparks joy” and say whyLoves good food and has a strong opinion on the best burrito within 2 miles (we do team meals)Someone with a chip on their shoulder who gets a thrill from proving doubters wrongLow-ego collaborator who gives and receives kind, actionable feedback
Details :
• Full time and internship (4-month minimum contract) options available• In person, M–F, 9–6.• Health benefits included, company holidays, team meals, sick leave, etc.• Preference given to candidates who can start immediately
How to Apply :
CONTACT
Designed in Palo Alto, California
© 2026 Syncere