Deep Learning - Robot Manipulation Engineer
Persona AI · Houston
Job Title: Deep Learning - Robot Manipulation Engineer
Department: Machine Learning
Reports To: Head of Machine Learning
Employment Type: Full-Time
Location: Houston, TX
Travel: 10%
Who We Are
Persona AI is building humanoid robots for the most demanding environments in heavy industry — shipyards, steel mills, fabrication facilities, and offshore platforms — performing welding, grinding, maintenance, inspection, and material-handling work that is dangerous, physically demanding, and increasingly difficult to staff.
We are backed by leading strategic and financial investors and engaged with global industrial leaders across Korea, Japan, the United States, and Singapore. Korea is the center of gravity for our early commercial strategy, anchored by relationships with the world’s leading shipbuilders and steelmakers. Our work spans both the robot platform itself and the systems, partners, and playbooks required to deploy it at scale.
Why Join Persona AI?
We offer competitive compensation, a performance-based bonus, 99% employer covered medical benefits, early-stage equity, competitive PTO, and a company-wide paid winter break between December 24th and January 2nd.
You’ll shape technology that’s redefining the possibilities of robotics and human interaction.
Work alongside passionate teammates who value creativity, and continuous learning.
About the Role
We're looking for a Deep Learning Manipulation Engineer to help train Persona AI robots to do real work in real world environments. We're looking for exceptional people who dream big, thrive on challenges, and love seeing their efforts come to life. We are primarily interested in candidates who have developed and released products to the market, but can be flexible depending on aptitude and energy.
As one of the inaugural Deep Learning Manipulation Engineers at Persona, you will have an incredible opportunity to get in at the beginning to shape the design and development of Persona’s deep learning and manipulation strategy and infrastructure. If you're passionate about cutting-edge technology and want to be part of a world-class team we'd love to hear from you.
What You Will Be Doing
Design and implement advanced deep learning models and training procedures to achieve dexterous manipulation for humanoid robots with high DOF and multi-fingered hands.
Train models, using curriculum learning strategies, to progress from simple object interactions to precise grasping, long-horizon tasks, tool-use, and in-hand object manipulation.
Incorporate tactile sensing and proprioception into end-to-end learning pipelines, enabling robust closed-loop policies.
Work with the teleoperation and data team to design data collection and versioning strategies.
Leverage existing state-of-the-art manipulation models and contribute to the development of new architectures for emerging complex tasks.
Deploy trained manipulation models to robotic hardware, ensuring real-time performance, safety, and integration with control systems and sensors.
Collaboratively develop and optimize the manipulation ML pipeline.
Keep up to date with the state of the art in research and development.
Develop and execute evaluation pipelines to rigorously test learned manipulation models, including real-world trials and simulation, measuring performance, robustness, and generalization across tasks and environments.
Collaborate in attracting, nurturing and growing the machine learning and autonomy teams.
What We Are Looking For:
Courage and grit to tackle some of the hardest problems in robot manipulation.
Enthusiasm for working collaboratively in fast paced ambiguous environments.
Masters or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, or a related field.
3+ years of experience in applying deep learning to robotic manipulation.
Strong understanding and proficiency with state of the art algorithms and best-practices in behavior cloning, vision-language-action models, diffusion policies, foundation models, etc.
Experience with cloud computing and large-scale datasets.
Understanding of the challenges of deploying neural network models in the real world.
Capable of writing high quality software.
Strong first principles thinker.
Bonus Skills:
Experience with other aspects of ML applied to robotics, including computer vision algorithms, sensors, point clouds, segmentation and object detection.
Published papers at top ML/Robotics conferences (ICML, ICRA, CoRL, RSS, NeurIPS).
Have deployed robots, collected large amounts of data, and trained large neural networks that work in production environments.
Persona AI is an Equal Opportunity Employer.
All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.
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