Founding Research Engineer

About Mbodi

Mbodi makes industrial robots learn like humans. Our AI software plugs into any robot and lets anyone teach it new skills through conversation. We're backed by leading investors. Our founders bring experience from Google and the University of Pennsylvania's robotics lab, and we're building a small, senior team focused on hard problems in the physical world.

We are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected status.

In this role, you will:

• Conduct applied research at the intersection of generative AI and robotics, with a focus on models and systems that work in the real world.
• Design and implement algorithms and models for robot learning, perception, planning, and skill generalization across complex tasks.
• Build robust, scalable systems that connect foundation models to reliable physical world execution, turning theory into impact.
• Collaborate across ML, robotics, and product to advance agent orchestration and intelligent system integration.
• Drive technical direction, architecture decisions, and research strategy from day one.

You'll thrive in this role if you:

• Have strong experience in AI, robotics, machine learning, or agentic systems.
• Are highly proficient in Python and PyTorch, with experience training, evaluating, and deploying neural networks.
• Understand modern ML techniques such as transformers, diffusion models, vision language models, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, or robotic foundation models.
• Have built and shipped real systems, not just trained models in isolation.
• Are comfortable working across models, data pipelines, APIs, evaluation workflows, and runtime components.
• Care deeply about reliability, latency, observability, and correctness in real world systems.
• Think in terms of failure modes, edge cases, and how systems behave under pressure.
• Are adaptable, execution focused, and comfortable with the ambiguity of startup life.

Why join us

This is a chance to work on one of the hardest and most important problems in AI: bringing intelligence into the physical world.

You will work directly with the founders and help shape the core platform, from agent architecture and robot learning to production deployment with global industrial customers.

We are building a small, senior team that wants to solve hard problems with real world stakes.