Machine Learning Engineer (RL/VLM) – Robotics Startup
New York, NY | $300–400k + Equity
Overview
We are looking for best-in-class ML Engineers who are experts in Reinforcement Learning (RL) & Visual Language Models (VLM) for a robotics start-up based in New York.
This startup is developing highly flexible, general-purpose robotic systems powered by cutting-edge AI. Their systems are already deployed with real customers, generating both revenue and valuable data. Rather than building humanoids or speculative prototypes, this company focuses on practical, AI-enabled robots that can be installed in hours and rapidly trained to perform real-world tasks.
Backed by a strong founding team and early-stage investment, the company is now scaling up deployments and expanding its technical team. This is an opportunity to work across the entire robotics stack and help shape the future of real-world automation.
Key Responsibilities
The successful candidate will play a hands-on role in the research, development, and deployment of advanced machine learning models for robotic control. Responsibilities include:

• Designing and implementing Reinforcement Learning algorithms for robotic manipulation and task execution.
• Developing and integrating Vision-Language Models to enable robots to understand and act upon high-level natural language commands and visual inputs.
• Working with large-scale datasets for training and fine-tuning ML models, including data collection and augmentation strategies.
• Collaborating with robotics software engineers to integrate ML models into the real-time control stack.
• Optimizing and deploying ML models to ensure low-latency performance on robotic hardware.
• Conducting experiments and evaluations to benchmark model performance and identify areas for improvement.
• Staying up-to-date with the latest research in RL, VLM, and embodied AI.

Key Requirements

• Strong machine learning fundamentals with a proven track record of delivering production-quality ML models.
• Expertise in Reinforcement Learning (RL), including experience with various RL algorithms (e.g., PPO, SAC, DDPG) and frameworks (e.g., Stable Baselines, Ray RLlib).
• Experience working with Vision-Language Models (VLM), including familiarity with models like CLIP, DALL-E, or similar, and their application to robotic perception and control.
• Proficiency with Python and deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Experience with large-scale data processing and training for deep learning models.
• Familiarity with robotics concepts and an understanding of how ML models interact with physical systems.
• Strong problem-solving skills and a collaborative approach to research and development.

Bonus Experience

• Experience with robot simulation tools (e.g., MuJoCo, Isaac Gym) for training and evaluating RL agents.
• Background in computer vision or natural language processing.
• Familiarity with robot operating systems (ROS/ROS2).
• Publications in top-tier ML or robotics conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CoRL, RSS).
• Experience deploying ML models to edge devices or embedded systems.

Why This Opportunity?
This is not a research lab in isolation. The company is already shipping robots and scaling fast. Engineers here work on systems that are used daily by real customers, generating value and shaping the roadmap for physical AI. The role offers strong compensation, early-stage equity, and the chance to help build something genuinely impactful from the ground up.
For ML Engineers who thrive on seeing their models come to life in the real world and have owned outcomes from concept to deployment, this is a unique opportunity to do it again - on a bigger stage, at the forefront of physical AI.

Interested?
I’m currently representing the team and would be happy to share more details confidentially. Please reach out to arrange a conversation.