Demo

Research Scientist, Atlas Behavior Learning

Boston Dynamics
Waltham, MA Full Time
POSTED ON 4/4/2026
AVAILABLE BEFORE 5/29/2026
Are you passionate about using machine learning to drive robot behavior? Curious what you’d be able to accomplish with total access to Boston Dynamics robots? As a Research Scientist on the Atlas Behavior Learning team, you will join a world-class team of engineers and scientists focused on creating groundbreaking mobile manipulation behaviors for humanoids.

We are investing in reinforcement learning (RL) and behavioral cloning (BC) as a key technology for achieving dexterous and robust whole-body manipulation that can be deployed in real-world environments.

In This Role, You Will Be Responsible For

  • Design, train, and deploy state of the art robot learning algorithms to tackle mobile &cz bimanual manipulation tasks
  • Contribute to foundation models shaping the future of humanoid robotics
  • Train control policies using RL to solve dexterous manipulation tasks
  • Distil many different policies using BC and RL with pixel observations
  • Deploying and debugging learned policies on Atlas

We Are Looking For

  • MS with 3 years of industry experience or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a related field
  • Extensive Experience training and deploying RL policies for complex behaviors on real robots or simulated characters
  • Excitement for integrating, running, and evaluating their learned policies on the robot
  • Has in-depth knowledge about domain randomization to bridge the sim-2-real gap
  • Strong foundation in Python and modern ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch and Jax)
  • Experience in algorithm design, debugging, and performance optimization

The Ideal Candidate Has

  • A PhD or equivalent research experience in reinforcement learning or robotic manipulation
  • Publications at top tier venues including RSS, CoRL, Science Robotics, ICLR, NeuRIPS
  • Familiarity with behavior cloning and has trained a diffusion policy from images
  • Prior experience with student-teacher training workflows

Why join us?

  • Direct access to cutting-edge robots and the infrastructure to run large-scale experiments
  • A collaborative, mission-driven team where your ideas have real impact
  • The chance to help define what’s possible in real-world robotics

Salary.com Estimation for Research Scientist, Atlas Behavior Learning in Waltham, MA
$121,175 to $151,547
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