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Research Scientist

Deft Robotics

Deft Robotics

San Francisco, CA, USA
USD 120k-250k / year + Equity
Posted on Mar 7, 2026

Our mission is to build the world’s first labor agency that deploys dexterous robots as its primary workforce.

  • We start by deploying wheeled humanoid robots in industrial manufacturing and assembly lines.
  • You’ll be joining a team of extremely hardcore and self-motivated engineers, scientists, and operators who focus on winning 24/7.
  • You will develop and own entire systems from design to deployment, playing a foundational role in deploying 5000+ robots by 2031.

What you'll do

  • Design and develop robot autonomy software stack and algorithms to enable capabilities including grasping and more dexterous behaviors in unstructured environments
  • Research and implement state-of-the-art robot learning policies, including reinforcement learning and imitation learning-based techniques
  • Build reliable, high-speed robot autonomy software stack optimized for inference performance
  • Design and maintain robust data collection and curation pipelines for production robot fleets
  • Optimize robot policies for distributed training at scale and real-time edge deployment
  • Ship production quality, safety-critical software

Required Qualifications

  • Master's/PhD degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or equivalent technical discipline
  • Deep expertise in machine learning fundamentals, reinforcement learning, and associated frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, Ray, etc.)
  • 3+ years of proven track record developing and deploying ML systems from research through production implementation
  • Hands-on experience with model lifecycle management including training, deployment, and maintenance in production settings

Preferred Qualifications

  • Authored or co-authored peer-reviewed publications in robotics or related fields
  • Hands-on experience designing and implementing bimanual manipulation tech stacks with imitation learning or RL-based methods
  • Background in real-time ML inference systems, simulation-to-reality transfer, or advanced reinforcement learning implementations

Benefits

  • We support publishing at top robotics/ML venues and presenting at conferences (travel + time fully covered).
  • Advance SOTA dexterous manipulation research through novel methodologies while bridging theory & practice—real customer use-cases with clear success criteria.
  • Medical, dental & vision plans
  • Daily meals stipend

Expected Compensation

  • $120,000 - $250,000 annual salary + cash and stock awards + benefits

Hiring Process

  • Phone screen + 3 virtual technical interviews + onsite