Staff Roboticist- Stretch Manipulation

Job description

Job responsibilities

• You’re excited to advance Stretch’s manipulation capabilities (grasping, motion generation, next box selection), delivering increased performance to customers who depend on Stretch daily.
• You track the latest advancements in robotics and physical AI with a critical eye, rigorously evaluating them for real-world performance benefits before deploying them as shippable features for our robot fleet.
• You know when to act scrappy to validate design concepts quickly, and when to build carefully to ensure a scalable, production-ready system.
• You rapidly iterate from concepts to on-robot tests to hardened features, following through to ensure new capabilities are polished before reaching the customer.
• You’re eager to engage with customer-facing teams (Product, Customer Success) and care deeply about solving real-world warehouse challenges.

Job requirements

• Deep expertise in classical manipulation (planning, control, grasping) or robot learning (imitation learning, RL, VLAs), with working fluency in the other.
• Bachelor's or Master's with 2+ years of experience, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Robotics, or a related field.
• Experience developing and evaluating classical and learned robot capabilities in simulation and via on-robot experiments; strong physical intuition, and confidence, comfort, and excitement when working with real robots.
• Excellent programming skills in C++ and Python within a Linux environment; strong debugging skills; familiarity with modern agentic programming workflows (e.g., Claude Code).
• Experience deploying robotic manipulation capabilities to production, especially in logistics or warehouse settings.