What are the responsibilities and job description for the Robotics/ML Engineer position at Index Robotics?
About us
Index Robotics is building robots that have a holistic understanding of the world. We believe true dexterity needs more than just vision to interpret and act on cues. Our founding team brings over a decade of experience building robot hardware and ML-driven robotic systems across CMU, Stanford, and NYU, and leading industrial research labs including Google DeepMind, Tesla, NVIDIA, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft Research. Join us to shape the next generation of dexterous, general-purpose robots.
The Role
We are looking for a Robotics Engineer to work on building the core intelligence stack from the ground up. This will involve developing perception, learning, and control systems that enable robots to understand their environment, respond to real-world conditions, and interact reliably through a comprehensive sensory suite.
The ideal candidate is a robotics or ML engineer with hands-on experience building and deploying systems at the intersection of hardware and software, either through academic research translated into working prototypes or by delivering robust, production-grade systems in an industrial setting.
What you will be doing
- Design and implement cutting-edge AI algorithms that enable robot learning.
- Develop and optimize learning-based robot policies, from training pipelines to real-time inference.
- Deploy AI models across simulation and physical robots.
- Co-design intelligence layers and underlying control systems to unlock smooth, reactive performance.
What we are looking for
We are looking for robotics generalists who can roll up their sleeves and work on all parts of the stack. In a single day, you might need to train a model, implement a real-time controller, and fix a broken robot.
You’d be a good fit if you have experience in all of the following:
- Working with robots in industrial or academic settings - arms, hands, legged, wheeled all count!
- Training neural networks - in an academic or industry context, in PyTorch or Jax
- Building software in Python and a low-level language (C , Rust, etc.).
Our team is comprised of “T-shaped” generalists: you’re a good fit if you ALSO have deep professional or academic experience in at least ONE of the following areas:
- Hands-on training experience in robot learning, such as reinforcement learning and imitation learning, classical control methods, planning, etc.
- Deploying robot arms into real industrial / commercial settings - where you had to think about safety, reliability, fleet management, integration, etc.
- Integrating multiple different sensors into a robotic system and optimizing controllers for fast, reactive control.
- Building real-time software systems where control or inference had strict timing requirements
- Setting up or maintaining ML training infrastructure for a team (including multi-node training)
Why join us
We’re hiring people to help build the company from the ground up. We work with experts, give them real ownership, and expect them to make consequential decisions without layers of process getting in the way. Because we design both the hardware and the intelligence in-house, you’ll work at the boundary between physical sensing and learning - solving problems that don’t have clean abstractions or software-only fixes. The work is hands-on, messy, and deeply rewarding.
We’re a small, flat team that values clarity, trust, and good judgment. As an early hire, you won’t just be executing someone else’s plan - you’ll help define how we build, how we work together, and what this company becomes. We take the work seriously, but not ourselves. If you want real responsibility, real impact, and a team that’s both ambitious and fun to work with, we’d love to talk.