Founding Research Engineer - Mobile Manipulation

Who are we: Sancho Robotics builds general-purpose mobile manipulators for advanced manufacturing. Our work was featured in the opening of the NVIDIA GTC 2026 keynote. Backed by $7 million in funding, our team has won multiple best-paper awards at top robotics conferences such as RSS and IROS and brings a decade of real-world robotics deployment experience. What you will doDevelop Mobile Manipulation Policies: Design and implement policies that enable a mobile manipulator to perform generalizable skills such as grasping, insertion, and tool use. Develop Control & Recovery Strategies: Develop robust control, compliance, and recovery strategies for contact-rich manipulation on hardware. Data Collection & Policy Deployment: Train, evaluate, and deploy robot policies using teleoperation data, robot logs, and simulation. Task Iteration: Systematically improve task success rates and expand platform generalizability through rigorous testing and failure analysis. What you will bring Hands‐on experience deploying robotic manipulation policies on real-world robot systems. Strong robotics fundamentals in kinematics, control, motion planning, and trajectory optimization. Experience in C++, ROS/ROS2, and simulators like MuJoCo or Isaac Lab. Sound technical judgment about when to use a math‐ or data‐driven approach.