Founding Engineer: Manipulation
Intelligence Factory, New York, New York
- Pay
- $80K–$200K / year
- Work type
- Not stated
- Level
- Not stated
- Area
- Software engineering, Inference & ML systems, ML / AI engineering
- Posted
- Apr 29, 2026
Check my fit
See how your résumé lines up with this role: where you match, what's missing, and lines worth rewording.
About the role
We're building foundation models for deploying general-purpose manipulation robots.
Our data infrastructure generates rich, multi-modal human demonstration data at exponential scale. We use it to train manipulation models that work reliably across tasks, objects, and robot embodiments. We are live in deployment across multiple verticals.
The robotics industry is focused on building bigger, more generalizable pre-trained models, but a robot has no commercial value unless it works 99% of the time. Our research is focused on bridging the gap between 40% to 99% in real world deployments.
As founding engineer, you'll own the model pipeline end-to-end. You'll have $750K in compute credits across Azure, AWS, and GCP, NVIDIA Inception perks, and a bespoke data pipeline already running.
What you'll do:
- Own the train-test-deploy loop: curation, training runs, evaluation, deployment
- Select and tune architectures for our foundation model
- Collaborate with research organizations
- Set technical direction for the model team
You should have:
- Experience implementing models end-to-end on robots, or research experience in VLAs, world models, or imitation learning
- Proof of decision-making with incomplete information
- Extremely competitive nature
- No aversion to unglamorous work, in robotics, research and debugging have to go hand-in-hand
- A track record that shows you genuinely want to see robots deployed in the real world, projects, research, or competitions
Our culture is built on honesty and a willingness to fail fast. If you see yourself fitting here, please apply.
Comp:
- $80K-$200K
- 0.1%-2% equity
- Incredible office in NYC. Equipment budget, meals, etc.
Similar roles at other companies
Applied Robotics Engineer
Generalintuition MedalNew York City
$180K–$300K / yr
Posted Sep 29, 2026
Robotics Engineer, AI & Software
Foundry RoboticsEmeryville, CA
$150K–$250K / yr
Posted Feb 9, 2026
Member of Technical Staff (Applied AI)
FactionNew York City
Pay not posted
Posted Nov 12, 2025
Founding Engineer, Environments + Data
CleraSan Francisco
$200K–$300K / yr
Posted 2 days ago
AI Research Engineer
CobotSeattle
Listed on Y Combinator's job board; checked 32 h ago. First seen by us 32 h ago. Being listed doesn't mean the team is actively interviewing.