Applied Researcher - Deployment Intelligence
Dyna Robotics · Redwood City
Dyna Robotics builds general-purpose robots powered by a proprietary embodied AI foundation model with top-in-industry generalization and real-world performance. Already deployed with customers across multiple industries, our robots do commercial-grade work in the physical world. Our team comes from Google DeepMind, Meta, and Cruise, and we're backed by CRV, First Round, and other leading investors.
The Role
Our models don't stop learning at deployment. A growing fleet of robots is generating real production data every day, and the gap between "works in the lab" and "works at a new customer site, forever" is a research problem, not just an ops one. As an Applied Researcher on the AI Research team, you'll own that gap: mining fleet sensor and video data for failure modes, building the monitoring that catches problems before customers do, and turning deployment data into continuous, measurable model improvement. This is a hands-on, ship-it role. We care far more about whether you can land a real improvement on the fleet than about producing research for its own sake.
What You'll Do
Continuous Learning Loops: Design and ship pipelines that turn real deployment data (successes, failures, teleop corrections) into targeted fine-tuning and online policy improvement, closing the loop from field to model without a full retrain cycle every time.
Fleet Data Analytics: Mine high-frequency multimodal sensor and video data across tens of thousands of fleet episodes to catch failure modes, drift, and regressions before they become customer-visible.
RL for Deployment: Apply reinforcement learning (offline RL, RL fine-tuning, reward modeling from human and teleop feedback) to improve policies directly from real-world deployment data, not just simulation.
Automated Fleet Monitoring: Build automated monitoring that flags anomalies, near-failures, and out-of-distribution scenes across the fleet in real time, and that decides what needs a human versus what the system can self-correct.
Cross-Scene Generalization: Characterize and close generalization gaps as robots move to new sites, lighting, layouts, and objects; build the evaluation harnesses and data-selection strategies that make day-one performance at a new customer site predictable.
End-to-End Ownership: Partner with Research, Data, and Deployment teams to turn a finding into a shipped improvement, from a data-analysis notebook to a production monitoring dashboard to a deployed model update.
What You'll Bring
Bias to Ship: You're happiest closing the loop, landing a fix on the fleet and watching it hold up at a real customer site, rather than polishing a benchmark number or a paper. We want someone driven by shipped impact and genuine passion for the problem, not research for its own sake.
Educational Background: Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in CS, Robotics, Statistics, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. Degree level doesn't matter to us; what matters is genuine passion for the work and a track record of hands-on effort that shipped into a real system, not just a benchmark.
Applied ML Depth: Hands-on experience in at least two of: reinforcement learning, sensor-data modeling/anomaly detection, vision-language models, or continual/online learning.
Production Instincts: Experience building monitoring, evaluation, or data pipelines for a live ML system, comfortable with the ambiguity of real-world fleet data versus curated benchmarks.
Experimentation & Statistics: Comfortable designing and reading production experiments (A/B tests, canary rollouts, staged fleet deployments) and applying enough statistical rigor to tell a real regression from noise in messy real-world data.
Technical Stack: Strong Python and PyTorch (or JAX); comfortable with large multimodal datasets and distributed compute (Slurm/GPU clusters).
Communication: Able to turn a fleet-scale data investigation into a clear recommendation that researchers and operators can act on.
Bonus Points For
Experience with robot fleets or other physically-deployed autonomous systems in the field, not just simulation.
Experience building or fine-tuning perception or foundation models for automated monitoring, captioning, or anomaly detection.
Background in statistical methods for detecting anomalies and drift (change-point detection, forecasting) applied to sensor or telemetry data.
Experience with human-in-the-loop learning: reward modeling from operator corrections, active learning, or data curation from failure cases.
At Dyna Robotics, we build technology for the real world, which requires a team as diverse as the environments our robots inhabit. We are an equal opportunity employer committed to technical rigor and mutual respect.
Don’t let a checklist stop you. Data shows that underrepresented groups often only apply if they meet 100% of the criteria. We value problem-solving and grit over keyword matching. If you’re passionate about robotics, no matter your discipline, we want to hear from you, even if you don't check every box.
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