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Clera

Research Engineer / Research Scientist — Robotics & Physical AI

San Francisco$100k–$300kfulltimemidAdded today

About this role

Join a Y Combinator-backed Physical AI startup to develop learning systems, simulation environments, and perception algorithms that enable robots to learn and operate in the real world. This hands-on role bridges research and engineering, combining algorithm development with hardware experimentation and infrastructure building.

What you'll do

  • Develop robot learning systems including policies, world models, and vision-language-action models
  • Build and maintain simulation environments and evaluation frameworks for robotic tasks
  • Apply computer vision and perception algorithms for autonomous robot perception
  • Design sim-to-real and real-to-sim pipelines for robot deployment
  • Train and evaluate reinforcement-learning and imitation-learning systems for manipulation and locomotion
  • Work with robot hardware, sensors, and embedded systems to prototype and validate algorithms

What they're looking for

  • Robotics simulation (Isaac Lab, MuJoCo, MJX, Genesis)
  • Reinforcement learning and imitation learning
  • C++ and Python
  • Computer vision and deep learning
  • Robot hardware and embedded systems
  • Sim-to-real transfer and domain adaptation
  • Machine learning infrastructure and tools
  • CAD or 3D modeling (Blender)

Benefits

  • Competitive salary up to $300,000 USD annually
  • Equity participation in venture-backed startup
  • Work on cutting-edge robotics and Physical AI research
  • Cross-functional collaboration on real-world robot deployment
  • Access to robot hardware and simulation infrastructure
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Clera

Clera builds an agentic operating system that automates complex workflows and processes through AI agents, with a platform designed to simplify distributed infrastructure management for developers. The company is hiring Founding Engineers, Customer Engineers, and Product Engineers to develop both backend systems and user-facing interfaces across their AI automation products.

View all jobs at Clera

Likely interview questions

  • Walk us through a robotics simulation project you built—what framework did you use and what challenges did you encounter in sim-to-real transfer?
  • Describe your experience training RL or imitation-learning systems for robot control. How did you handle exploration, data collection, and evaluation?