Turing · 21 hours ago
Robotics Engineer
Boston, MA
Full-time
Hybrid
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
$156K/yr - $208K/yr
8+ years expTuring is a leading research accelerator for frontier AI labs based in San Francisco, California, seeking a Robotics Engineer with experience in training foundation models for robotics. The role involves designing high-value datasets, leading model evaluations, and establishing a new business unit focused on benchmarking and optimization.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)Generative AIInformation TechnologyMachine LearningSoftware Engineering
Responsibilities
Design "Off-the-Shelf" Solutions: Leverage your experience to define specifications for high-value dataset products (e.g., "The definitive bi-manual manipulation dataset for household objects"). You will dictate the requirements to our Sim, Teleop, and Motion Capture teams to ensure they capture the •right• data
Commercial Engagement: Partner with the Sales team as a key technical authority. You will translate customer pain points (e.g., "Our model fails on transparent objects") into well defined data solutions
Quality Definition: Move beyond basic QA (resolution, frame rate) to semantic QA. Define what "high-quality" data looks like for model learning
Build the "Eval" Loop: Establish workflows to train and fine-tune open-source Robotics Foundation Models (e.g., OpenVLA, Octo, RT-X) on our data. You will empirically prove that Turing's data improves model performance
Agentic Gap Analysis: Develop automated workflows to analyze datasets for coverage gaps. Use this analysis to provide high-value insights to customers (e.g., "Your model is failing because your training distribution lacks diverse lighting conditions—here is the synthetic data to fix it")
Benchmark-as-a-Service: Lead the development of virtual and physical benchmarking environments to test customer policies
The Optimization Loop: Build a full-cycle service where Turing: (1) Benchmarks a client's model, (2) Identifies performance gaps, (3) Translates gaps into data requirements, and (4) Delivers the data to close the loop
Establish a New Business Unit: Scale these capabilities into a dedicated "Benchmarking & Optimization" business unit. You will help build this new pillar, recruiting the team, defining the product solution, and driving the monetization strategy
Qualification
Required
8+ years of total experience as a seasoned technologist with cross-functional operational experience
5+ years in Robotics Learning with deep hands-on experience training and deploying machine learning models for robotics (Imitation Learning, RL, or VLA architectures)
3+ Years of cross-functional & commercial experience in which you have 'bridged the gap' between research and product sales (e.g., Applied Scientist, Technical Lead, or Solutions Architect)
Expert proficiency in Python. You must be capable of writing production-grade ML code, custom data loaders, and evaluation pipelines from scratch
Deep proficiency in PyTorch or JAX. Experience implementing and debugging complex deep learning architectures
Direct hands-on experience training, fine-tuning, or evaluating advanced robotics policies. Specifically, familiarity with Diffusion Policies or VLA architectures
Proficiency with ROS (Robot Operating System). You must understand message passing, node architecture, and how to interface with hardware drivers
Experience manipulating standard robotics data formats. You understand the structure of 'trajectory' data (state-action pairs)
Strong grasp of 3D spatial mathematics (quaternions, coordinate frames, transformations) essential for manipulating robot kinematics and camera data
Entrepreneurial mindset required: ability to own end-to-end solutions, including technical execution, customer engagement, cost/ROI tradeoff analysis, and value communication to technical and non-technical stakeholders
Preferred
You know exactly what makes a dataset valuable when building advanced robotics foundational models
You are comfortable explaining technical constraints to Sales teams, Product Managers, or external clients
Experience with NVIDIA Isaac Sim, Unity, MuJoCo, or Genesis. Ideally, you have built custom benchmark environments or generated synthetic datasets
Experience setting up distributed training workflows on cloud clusters and using experiment tracking tools like Weights & Biases (W&B)
Experience using Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and other tools to automatically label or annotate large datasets
Ability to read and debug C++ code is a plus (useful for troubleshooting hardware drivers or legacy ROS nodes), but production coding in C++ is not required
Experience deploying models to edge compute devices (e.g., NVIDIA Jetson) or directly onto robot controllers
Benefits
Equity
Amazing work culture (Super collaborative & supportive work environment; 5 days a week)
Awesome colleagues (Surround yourself with top talent from Meta, Google, LinkedIn etc. as well as people with deep startup experience)
Competitive compensation
Flexible working hours
Company
Turing
Turing advances frontier AI and builds real-world systems for Fortune 500 companies, governments, and the world’s leading AI labs.
1001-5000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Turing has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
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Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (16)
2024 (8)
2023 (7)
2022 (16)
2021 (6)
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageTotal Funding
$270.19MKey Investors
Khazanah NasionalAltaIR CapitalWestBridge Capital
2025-03-06Series E· $111M
2021-12-07Convertible Note· $6.85M
2021-10-04Series D· $87M
Leadership Team
Jonathan Siddharth
Founder & CEO
Vijay Krishnan
Founder & CTO
Recent News
Foundation Capital
2025-12-31
2025-11-22
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