What are the responsibilities and job description for the Technical Associate I position at Massachusetts Institute of Technology?
Posting Description
TECHNICAL ASSOCIATE I
, Comp Sci & Artificial Intelligence Lab , works support an active research program at the intersection of immersive teleoperation and learned manipulation policies, with a focus on robot legibility, making learned robot behavior interpretable and predictable to the humans working alongside it. The Technical Associate will build and maintain the lab's VR-based teleoperation and data-collection infrastructure, support the collection and curation of robot demonstration datasets, and assist in training, deploying, and evaluating vision-language-action (VLA) policies on physical multi-arm and dexterous manipulation platforms. This is a hands-on research engineering role with substantial intellectual scope: the person in this position will contribute to experimental design and to publications, not only to system maintenance.
The full job description is available, here: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/j7o8p3ws4wqo3b2llzqed/Technical-Associate-1-sept..-2026-Bobu.docx?rlkey=mioxm2nt7qju2fh1q269qnf5t&st=j522isjy&dl=0
Job Requirements
REQUIRED : Bachelor's degree in computer science, robotics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience; strong programming ability in Python; demonstrated hands-on experience with physical robot systems including at least one of: manipulator control, teleoperation, motion planning, or robot hardware integration; working knowledge of ROS or ROS 2; practical experience training and evaluating deep learning models in PyTorch; demonstrated ability to debug across the full stack: hardware, drivers, middleware, and learning code; and ability to work independently on open-ended problems, and to communicate technical findings clearly in writing and in discussion.
This position is well suited to someone with a bachelor's or master's degree who intends to pursue graduate study in robotics and wants a period of deep, full-time research experience beforehand.
This is a 1-year funded position, with possibility of extension.
10/5/2026
Salary : $50,000