Research Engineer, Robotics (PhD)

About the position

The Surreal Team at Meta’s Reality Lab Research is a multi-disciplinary, vertically integrated R&D group. Our expertise spans a wide range, from hardware prototyping and software/hardware co-design to comprehensive end-to-end system integration, enhancing the overall end-user experience. We specialize in an array of cutting-edge technologies in ego-centric machine perception and robotics AI including areas such as transfer learning, learning from demonstration, reinforcement learning, perception, representation learning, robot control, navigation, mobile manipulation, dexterous manipulation, vision-language models, and contextually aware AI. The research and development work spans across data collection / generation, algorithm development and end-to-end deployment onto robot platforms.

Responsibilities

• Build data collection/generation platforms and develop algorithms based on state-of-the-art machine learning and neural network methodologies.
• Build end-to-end applications for robotics tasks such as navigation, dexterous manipulation, whole-body controlling, long-horizon reasoning, etc.
• Invent/improve novel data-driven paradigms for robotics intelligence, including AR, VR, and robotics, leveraging a variety of modalities (images, video, text, audio, tactile, etc).
• Investigate paradigms that can deliver a spectrum of robotics behaviors - from simulated characters to real robots, and from short-horizon, low-level to long-horizon, high-level intelligence.
• Define, build and benchmark new algorithms needed for the next generation of AI.

Requirements

• Currently has, or is in the process of obtaining a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, relevant technical field, or equivalent practical experience. Degree must be completed prior to joining Meta.
• Currently has or is in the process of obtaining a PhD degree in the field of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, Machine Learning, a related field, or equivalent practical experience. Degree must be completed prior to joining Meta.
• Research experience in robotics, motion planning, embodied AI, human-robot interaction, sim-to-real transfer, learning from demonstration, reinforcement learning, dexterous manipulation.
• Experience in C/C++ and Python.
• Experience with deep learning frameworks: pytorch or tensorflow.
• Must obtain work authorization in the country of employment at the time of hire and maintain ongoing work authorization during employment.
• Experience with robotics frameworks like Robot Operation System (ROS), along with experience working with robotic simulations and real-world robots.
• Experience with research and development for humanoid robots.
• Experience with research areas such as Vision Language Models, Egocentric Perception, Large Language Models and Natural Language Processing.
• Experience with manipulating and analyzing complex, large scale, high-dimensionality data from varying sources.
• Demonstrated research and software engineering experience via an internship, work experience, coding competitions, or widely used contributions in open source repositories (e.g. GitHub).
• Proven track record of achieving significant results as demonstrated by grants, fellowships, patents, as well as publications at leading workshops, journals or conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ICRA, IROS, RSS, CoRL, CVPR, ICCV and ECCV.
• Experience working and communicating cross functionally in a team environment.
• Experience solving complex problems and comparing alternative solutions, tradeoffs, and different points of view to determine a path forward.