Research Engineer, Robot Foundation Models
Full-time
Palo Alto, CA, USA
About Mind:
Mind Robotics is building universally capable robots to transform industrial work, starting on the factory floor. We're vertically integrated:
We train our own foundation models.
We build our own robots.
We collect data directly in the factories where our robots will work, starting with Rivian, our first manufacturing partner, in addition to third-party data.
About the team and the role:
Our research speed is set by how fast an idea becomes a training run, and a training run becomes a model on a robot. You'll make that loop fast: large-scale distributed training, data loading from petabyte-scale multimodal datasets, fast evaluation, and getting models running on robots.
Why this is hard:
The data is physical and big. Synchronized multi-camera video, proprioception, force and tactile streams at petabyte scale. Keeping GPUs fed from affordable storage is a core design problem.
The model ends on a robot. Inference has real-time latency budgets on compute-limited hardware in a factory.
We're a flat organization, and everyone contributes directly to getting our robots deployed. You'll run experiments alongside the researchers, not just support them.
Responsibilities:
Scale and harden large-scale distributed training, from parallelism strategy to checkpointing and fault tolerance.
Profile and speed up the training stack end to end, and track throughput and cost per run.
Build high-throughput data loading for multimodal robot data, from raw logs to the GPU.
Make experiments easy to launch, monitor, debug and reproduce, and run your own ablations alongside the researchers.
Make evaluation fast, and get models running on the robot within its latency budget.
Build whatever the work needs, and own the problem end to end.
Requirements:
You've built and scaled training for large models on large multi-node GPU clusters.
Deep knowledge of PyTorch or JAX and modern distributed training, including what happens under the hood.
You know where the time goes: you profile, find the bottleneck and fix it.
Enough understanding of how modern foundation models are trained to shape the experiments, not just run them.
Strong Python and solid engineering.
Nice to Have:
Writing custom GPU kernels or working on compilers.
Petabyte-scale data loading or video decoding on GPU.
Robotics data or real-time inference on edge hardware.
Experience as an early hire.
Why Mind
Your work ships to a factory. Faster training means better robots on a real line, sooner.
Greenfield. Pick the stack and design it for multimodal robot data from day one.
Compute isn't the bottleneck. Ample GPU capacity and a petabyte-scale dataset, so your work is about using compute well, not finding it.
Early ownership. Meaningful equity and a direct say in how we train and deploy models.