Helix AI Engineer, Robot Learning (Humanoid Manipulation) at Figure AI (San Jose)

Job Description

Figure’s Helix team is hiring a robot learning engineer to develop the visuomotor manipulation policies that let its humanoid robots grasp, place, reorient objects, open doors, use both hands and do basic assembly, with a strong emphasis on deploying on real robots. The role owns the pipeline from real-robot data collection to training, evaluation and deployment.

At a glance

• Team: Helix AI
• Location: San Jose, California (five days a week in the office)
• Pay: $200,000 – $400,000 a year, as listed
• Apply: open until filled (re-checked 14 October 2026)

What you would do

• Design, train, evaluate and deploy learning-based visuomotor policies for humanoid manipulation
• Develop grasping, pick-and-place, reorientation, door opening, bimanual manipulation and basic assembly skills
• Apply and extend behaviour cloning, reinforcement learning and vision-language-action (VLA) methods
• Make models robust to sensor noise, partial observability, contact dynamics and changing environments
• Write well-tested software that runs reliably on physical robots, working with perception, controls and hardware teams

Why this role matters

Dexterous manipulation is the hardest remaining problem for humanoid robots: walking is largely solved, but reliably handling everyday objects is not. Figure deploys its robots in commercial settings, so this team’s policies face real tasks and real variability every day, which makes the work both demanding and unusually concrete.

What Figure AI is looking for

• A strong robot learning background with real-robot deployment experience
• Experience with behaviour cloning, RL or VLA models
• High-quality software engineering

Nice to have

• Simulation and digital-twin experience used for sim-to-real transfer

Pay and location

Figure lists $200,000 to $400,000 a year for this role.

How to apply

Apply through the official Figure AI job posting. Figure AI’s posting does not give a closing date, so the role is open until filled; ResearchJobs.in will re-check this listing on 14 October 2026. Check the posting for location and work-authorisation details before you apply.

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