What are the responsibilities and job description for the Member of Technical Staff, Research position at Industrial Next (YC W22)?
About IndustrialNext
We envision a world where no manual labor is required to build anything and everything we want.
A Safe world with abundant creativity.
We're building a rapidly scalable, high-performing robotic system for fully autonomous factories. We deliver across multiple embodiments — bimanual / single-arm stations, wheeled humanoids, and mobile manipulators — on a shared stack. Every task we ship has to hit ≥99% success at human or industrial-automation cycle time.
Physical AI is moving fast. Academia and research-focused startups have shown promising early results, but very few have shipped robots that work at industrial precision, speed, and reliability. We have, and that gap is our work.
We invite highly talented AI and robotics engineers excited to join a hyper-scaling startup. You'll work tirelessly to ship first products to early customers while building the foundation models and robots to reshape global manufacturing.
What we believe
- Real-world deployment beats paper benchmarks. Our bar is what runs at customer cycle time with high success rate and dexterity. Every shift, for months and years.
- Commercialized Data Flywheel is critical for Scalable Foundation Models. We're not waiting until our foundation model is ready. We build and deploy working robots, while also building a data pipeline to feed into our foundation model.
- Hardware iteration speed is a moat. Custom grippers, mobile platforms, and data rigs at production runs of dozens to hundreds. Moving fast from hardware design to deployment is what wins.
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Role: Member of Technical Staff, Research
Why this role matters
We're building the AI behind our manufacturing systems — perception models, foundation models, and policies that ship at customer cycle time. We hire research engineers across the spectrum, from cameras-and-calibration deep work to foundation-model training. The common bar is real results on real robots, not papers.
What you'll do
- Build perception models, foundation models, and policies for dexterous manipulation.
- Train and validate across handheld data, simulation, and real-robot deployment.
- Build infrastructure for large scale data collection, model training and deployment.
- Drive sim-first workflow and self-improving learning on real cells.
Required
- Education. BS in CS / CSE; MS or PhD in robotics or AI focused on manipulation, or equivalent industry depth.
- Experience. 3 years combined graduate and professional experience in manipulation-focused AI — perception, IL/RL, foundation models, or any combination.
- Vision and policy model fluency. Has built or fine-tuned several SOTA vision or VLA models from scratch. Build Imitation Learning and Reinforcement Learning models. Speaks to architecture, training procedure, loss design, and failure modes.
- Data pipelines. Has built or substantially extended an annotation or data-collection pipeline that fed real model improvements.
- Real robot experience in manipulation.Hands-on experience with humanoid, mobile manipulator, or dual-arm stations.
Strongly preferred
We hire both perception specialists and foundation-model / IL / RL specialists; depth in either flavor raises the bar.
- Hands-on experience in real world perception: camera selection, calibration, lighting / glare / transparency mitigation, edge-case manipulation.
- Real-world deployment. Has shipped models on real robots — including the unglamorous parts (calibration drift, lighting, dataset rot, distribution shift).
- Simulation tooling. Comfortable in IsaacSim, MuJoCo, or equivalent — synthetic data, validation, sim2real.
- Edge deployment with tight latency budgets.
- Built teleoperation pipelines and worked alongside operators.
- First-author papers at top robotics and machine learning conferences.
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How we work
We are looking for hard, relentless engineers who treat shipping as the only metric.
- In-person, on the hardware. SF, on-site, full-time. Relocation will be supported.
- Insane work ethic. Startups win by fast speed, focused and relentless pushes.
- High ownership, high equity. Small team, meaningful equity. Your contribution is significant.
- Demanding and fast-paced. Tight timing constraints, customer commitments, little slack.
If you've thrived at SpaceX, Tesla, or other fast-moving startups, you'll recognize the energy. If "work-life balance" is your top filter, we are not the right fit.
What we offer
- Competitive base salary meaningful equity in an early-stage, fast-growing company.
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
- Relocation support to SF Bay Area.
- A team you'll learn from every day, working on problems that haven't been solved yet.
Equal opportunity
We are an equal opportunity employer. We hire on merit and welcome candidates from any background.