Senior Roboticist
Astera Institute is an active nonprofit research institute and foundation that operates in-house neuroscience-informed AI research and funds, operates, and supports open-science programs and public goods.
About Astera Institute
Astera operates three divisions: Neuro-AI, Radial life-sciences research, and its Foundation. Its AI work pursues neuroscience-informed approaches to artificial general intelligence, while its foundation and Radial activities support open scientific infrastructure, datasets, research programs, and residencies.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will advance robot capabilities and coordinate work across perception, learning, simulation, control, hardware integration, and deployment. You will turn scientific priorities into robotics programs, mentor and recruit talent, solve technical bottlenecks, establish rigorous evaluation, and guide hardware and resource decisions.
Requirements
- 10+ years of robotics research and engineering experience
- 5+ years leading technical teams or robotics programs
- Robotics research or engineering accomplishments on physical systems
- Robotics expertise in perception, robot learning, simulation, motion planning, control, and deployment
- Ability to build reliable and reproducible robotic capabilities
- Experience recruiting, mentoring, and coordinating technical teams
- Modern AI knowledge
- PhD in robotics, computer science, engineering, or related field, or equivalent accomplishments
Responsibilities
- Advance reliable robotic capabilities
- Design and execute the robotics roadmap with lab leadership
- Coordinate projects across perception, learning, simulation, control, hardware integration, and deployment
- Guide research from algorithms and simulation to real-world deployment
- Recruit, evaluate, onboard, and mentor robotics talent
- Solve technical problems across experiments, algorithms, software, and system architecture
- Develop reproducible benchmarks and testing practices
- Collaborate with AI and neuroscience specialists
- Recommend hardware, compute, and tooling investments
- Communicate progress, risks, and tradeoffs to lab leadership