Research Scientist
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