Robot Learning Engineer

About the role

ABOUT LIGHTSPEED

LightSpeed Build Technologies is revolutionizing the construction industry through AI-powered robotics. Our flagship systems—BRUTE for automated wall panel manufacturing and DEX for on-site collaborative construction—are addressing the global housing crisis by delivering unprecedented speed, precision, and affordability in homebuilding.

POSITION OVERVIEW

As a Robot Learning Engineer, you will teach our robots to perform complex manipulation tasks from human demonstration. You will own the path from demonstration to deployed behavior: building the teleoperation systems that capture how skilled people do the work, turning that data into trained policies, and proving those policies on real robots with dexterous hands and custom tooling. You'll also shape how we learn from video of people doing the work itself. This role is hands-on, fast-moving, and measured by one thing: robots that reliably do the job.

WHAT YOU'LL WORK ON

TELEOPERATION & DEMONSTRATION DATA

- Build and improve teleoperation pipelines using leader arms for bulk arm motion and VR hand tracking for fine, finger-level interaction

- Retarget human hand motion to a dexterous robot hand, developing in simulation first and validating on hardware

- Design data collection protocols so demonstrations are consistent, well-structured, and train well

- Define what data is worth collecting and how much, and guide technicians who run collection sessions

POLICY LEARNING

- Train and fine-tune manipulation policies using imitation learning and vision-language-action (VLA) models

- Choose policy architectures and action representations suited to multi-step, contact-rich tasks

- Combine teleoperation data with human demonstration video to improve policies

- Iterate quickly from data to trained policy to real-robot trial

EVALUATION & DEPLOYMENT

- Define and run evaluation protocols on real robots, measuring success rate per task step

- Diagnose failures across data, model, and hardware, and fix the right one

- Deploy policies on robots with ROS2-based control and optimize inference for real-time performance

- Work with integration engineers to run policies across a full task sequence

DATA PIPELINE & VENDOR OVERSIGHT

- Define dataset formats and data quality standards for training

- Supervise external partners who build data pipeline infrastructure and label human demonstration video, and set specs and accept deliveries

- Prototype extraction of useful training signals from egocentric (head-mounted camera) video in-house before scaling it out

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

ROBOT LEARNING

- 3+ years of hands-on experience in robot learning, ML for robotics, or closely related production ML

- Experience training policies from demonstrations on physical robots using imitation learning (e.g., ACT, Diffusion Policy, or similar)