Full-Stack Robotics & AI Engineer

About the role

ABOUT ASTERA

Astera Institute is a private foundation supporting ambitious work in science and technology through grants, investments, and in-house research. Its research programs combine the pace and autonomy of a startup with the freedom to pursue difficult scientific questions. Learn more about Astera’s mission at astera.org/vision http://astera.org/vision.

ABOUT THE ROBOTICS LAB

We are building a frontier robotics lab at Astera Institute. We believe neuroscience and AI will converge in embodied intelligence: animals and robots face shared challenges of perceiving their surroundings, navigating, manipulating objects, and using memory and reasoning to accomplish tasks in the physical world. Robotics provides a powerful testbed for investigating how biological neural circuits solve these challenges and for developing AI systems that turn perception, learning, and cognition into effective action.

Our strategy starts with making robots useful, while developing a mechanistic understanding of how neural circuits can generate intelligent behavior. We aim to continually expand the repertoire of behaviors a robot can perform reliably in real environments, while improving its ability to learn new skills, adapt to changing conditions, and recover from failure. These practical capabilities provide both measurable outcomes and a foundation for investigating deeper principles of intelligence.

POSITION SUMMARY

We are looking for an engineer who can take a learning-based robotics system from model development to reliable operation on a physical robot. You will work across perception, policy learning, inference, and robot integration, connecting what a model predicts to what a robot actually does.

This is a hands-on engineering role in our Robotics Lab in Emeryville, California. You will work closely with researchers and hardware engineers to develop manipulation capabilities, investigate failures on real robots, and improve the software and models together.

CORE RESPONSIBILITIES

- Develop models for robotic manipulation. Fine-tune and evaluate vision and action models for robotic manipulation, using pretrained models and robot data.

- Connect perception to action. Build the software that connects cameras and other sensors to model inference and robot commands, including calibration, coordinate transforms, action representations, and control interfaces.

- Optimize models for deployment. Deploy models on robot hardware and optimize inference latency, memory use, and throughput through profiling, distillation, compilation, and precision changes.

- Build responsive policy execution. Implement responsive policy execution, including asynchronous inference and action chunking where appropriate.

- Diagnose failures across the stack. Debug failures across the full system—from observations and model outputs to middleware and physical motion—and build logging, replay, and evaluation tools to understand them.