Senior Research Engineer, Robotics
Tutor Intelligence · Watertown, MA; San Francisco, CA
Extracted from the posting
Turns research ideas into policy experiments on DF1 real robots, covering task setup, data collection, rollouts, and analysis. Builds evaluation tooling, robot-side inference and control software with safety limits, and the teleoperator intervention loop feeding data back into training. Requires Python, hands-on experience running learned policies on physical robots, and Linux/networking debugging.
About Tutor
We believe robots are the biggest lever we have to making the physical world a better, more affordable place. But robots are a rounding error in our society: nearly nine out of ten American factories and warehouses don’t even have a single robot, and robots have yet to make their way into our homes or places of business.
Tutor Intelligence is changing that.
Tutor is a robotics research and deployment company, building generally capable robot hardware and artificial intelligence to enable robots to go where no robots have gone before.
Sonny
is a semi-humanoid robot with frontier dexterity approaching the human form.
Cassie
does back-breaking work, moving boxes, pallets, and bulk goods for businesses from family-owned manufacturers to some of the largest brands in the world. Tutor robots are manufactured at scale and operate as a network, combining the whole fleet’s learned experience to train ever more capable robot artificial intelligence.
Founded at MIT and headquartered in Watertown, MA, our team is full stack: we design and manufacture robot hardware, train our own models, work directly with the smallest and largest end-customers, and maintain our fleet across the United States. We’re a team of researchers, engineers, technicians, operators, and sellers who love building things and solving hard problems.
Our mission is grand: robots everywhere, for the common good, raising the standard of living across North America, and then the world.
The Role
Tutor's research team pushes the frontier of robot capability across the full stack. Researchers have access to
100+ robots
for data collection and evaluation, a massive network of teleoperators, scaled hardware and manufacturing infrastructure, and the ability to collect real world data at enormous scale. Our work covers the complete lifecycle of real-world data generation and model training from initial behavior cloning to post-training with supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. And researchers and research engineers work closely with applied engineers to develop novel techniques into robot products that can be deployed at scale.
As a research engineer on robotics, you'll turn research ideas into experiments that run on real robots, and make the results trustworthy.
What you'll work on
- Build and run policy experiments on DF1, from task setup and data collection through rollouts and analysis.
- Own evaluation: task suites, success metrics, and tooling that make results comparable across robots, operators, and model versions.
- Build the robot-side software that runs policies: inference, control interfaces, safety limits, and logging.
- Improve the intervention loop, so teleoperators can step in when a policy fails and that data flows back into training.
- Debug failures that cross perception, control, hardware, and model behavior.
- Work with research scientists on what to try next, and with applied engineers on what's ready to deploy.
Requirements
- Strong Python, and maintainable, tested code that runs on real hardware.
- Hands-on experience running learned policies or other autonomy on physical robots.
- Experience designing experiments and judging whether a result is real.
- Comfort debugging across Linux, networking, sensors, and robot control.
Nice to haves
- Robot arms and manipulation; ROS or a similar framework.
- PyTorch and GPU inference.
- Teleoperation or VR systems.
- C++.
Why Tutor?
Whether you’re designing robots, closing deals, running deployments, or creating the processes that help us scale, your work doesn’t sit on a shelf. It shows up on real production floors, making physical work safer and more affordable.
Our team of 160+ is driven by curiosity and a genuine love of building. Everyone here takes real ownership, learns fast, and holds a high bar while having each other’s backs. If you love hard problems and creating things that didn’t exist before, you’ll fit right in.
Benefits
We take care of our team so they can do their best work. At Tutor, you’ll get:
- Fully employer-covered health insurance, so you’re protected without the premium.
- A managed 401(k) to help you plan for the future.
- Generous time off: unlimited PTO and all federal holidays off for full-time salaried employees, and 16+ days of accrued paid time off plus 1.5x pay on federal holidays for hourly employees.
- Regular in-office meals and team social events throughout the year.
As Tutor grows, so will our benefits. We’re continuing to invest in ways to support our team at work and beyond.
Tutor Intelligence is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes applicants from all backgrounds.
Compensation: USD 180,000 – 315,000 per year salary
