- Waddle Labs
- San Francisco, CA
- Full-Time
- <72 Hours
Founding Research Engineer.
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Founding Research Engineer: our view in 3 lines...
- The Role:This role is for a founding research engineer working on LLMs that control robots in an applied AI lab.
- The Person:The person will set technical direction, build and deploy systems, launch training runs, design evaluation and trace-collection infrastructure, and help grow and lead a small engineering and research team.
- Requirements:The ideal candidate has strong foundations in machine learning, computer science, mathematics, and experience with LLM agents, post-training methods, evaluation systems, and deploying ML systems on robots.
About the role
We’re hiring a Founding Research Engineer to help build and eventually lead a team of exceptional engineers and researchers.
Your most important responsibility will be accelerating the research loop: ideating directions, leading a team to build them into working systems, and deploying those systems to gather feedback. The speed with which you iterate is central to our success. In your first 30 days, you’ll plan a new capability for our API, launch training runs and implement your plan, then deploy it on robots in factories.
This role combines collaboration with hand-on work. You’ll work with the founders to set technical direction, take ownership of execution, and contribute directly to the systems you lead. You should be comfortable designing complex systems and diving into the implementation yourself.
What You’ll Do
- Grow and lead a small, high-performing team, setting clear expectations and maintaining a high bar for technical quality and execution.
- Set technical direction and make foundational architecture and system-design decisions, with a focus on reliability and performance.
- Build core systems, including agent harnesses, robot simulation and evaluation environments, trace-collection pipelines, and infrastructure for post-training models.
- Recruit and close exceptional engineering and research talent.
Skills and Qualifications
- Strong research judgment: you can turn open-ended ideas into concrete experiments, interpret the results, and iterate quickly.
- Strong foundations in machine learning, computer science, mathematics, or a related technical discipline, developed through research, industry, or independent work.
- High agency and comfort operating quickly in an ambiguous, early-stage environment.
Preferred qualifications
We don’t expect candidates to meet every preferred qualification, but you should have depth in some of the following:
- Experience building LLM agents that use tools, reason over long horizons, or operate in interactive environments.
- Experience with post-training methods such as supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning, including running and debugging distributed training jobs.
- Experience building evaluation systems, synthetic-data pipelines, reward functions, or infrastructure for collecting and analyzing model traces.
- Experience deploying ML systems in the real world, especially on robots or other systems with latency, reliability, and hardware constraints.
- Experience leading technically ambitious projects, mentoring engineers, or helping recruit and build a high-performing team.
We are an applied AI lab building LLMs that control robots.
We believe that the bitter lesson applies to robotics. Our thesis is that generalist models like LLMs will perform better than robot-specific models like VLAs. This means that we are counter-positioned against companies like Physical Intelligence.
We've raised $19M in seed funding, with participation from researchers at OpenAI, Google Deepmind, and Cognition. The founders met during RSI at MIT and studied math/physics at Harvard before leaving to start Waddle Labs.
Our mission is to define how humans work with robots. We're looking for early collaborators to help shape this vision.
