Senior Roboticist

ABOUT ASTERA Astera Institute is a private foundation supporting ambitious work in science and technology through grants, investments, and in-house research. Its research programs combine the pace and autonomy of a startup with the freedom to pursue difficult scientific questions. Learn more about Astera’s mission at https://astera.org/visionastera.org/vision http://astera.org/vision. ABOUT THE ROBOTICS LAB We are building a frontier robotics lab at Astera Institute. We believe neuroscience and AI will converge in embodied intelligence: animals and robots face shared challenges of perceiving their surroundings, navigating, manipulating objects, and using memory and reasoning to accomplish tasks in the physical world. Robotics provides a powerful testbed for investigating how biological neural circuits solve these challenges and for developing AI systems that turn perception, learning, and cognition into effective action. Our strategy starts with making robots useful, while developing a mechanistic understanding of how neural circuits can generate intelligent behavior. We aim to continually expand the repertoire of behaviors a robot can perform reliably in real environments, while improving its ability to learn new skills, adapt to changing conditions, and recover from failure. These practical capabilities provide both measurable outcomes and a foundation for investigating deeper principles of intelligence. Building on our existing research results and working robotic systems, we are seeking a few senior roboticists to advance our robotics capabilities and lead technical execution. POSITION SUMMARY You will contribute to the robotics research and engineering effort within a multidisciplinary team spanning robotics, AI, and computational neuroscience. Your focus will be advancing robot capabilities, coordinating execution across the robotics stack, and translating research into reliable performance on physical systems. Working closely with the lab’s leadership, you will turn scientific priorities into concrete robotics programs, recruit and mentor robotics researchers and engineers, and establish rigorous technical standards. You will bring deep robotics expertise and the ability to collaborate with colleagues in AI and neuroscience, connecting their contributions to functioning robotic systems. This is a hands-on leadership role on research and/or engineering. You should be comfortable evaluating a learning architecture, reviewing a control or perception pipeline, designing a decisive experiment, and working directly with the team to resolve difficult technical bottlenecks. CORE RESPONSIBILITIES - Advance useful robotic capabilities. Expand the range of skills robots can perform reliably, with clear improvements in task success, generalization, learning efficiency, adaptation, and recovery from failure. - Help design and execute the robotics roadmap. Work with the lab’s leadership to translate scientific priorities into coordinated projects across perception, learning, simulation, control, hardware integration, and deployment. Help define milestones, coordinate technical efforts, and resolve dependencies to deliver reliable robotic capabilities. - Connect research to physical systems. Guide work from algorithm development and simulation through real-world deployment. Establish effective cycles of data collection, training, evaluation, failure analysis, and improvement. - Recruit and develop robotics talent. Help recruit for robotics research and engineering roles, including candidate sourcing, technical evaluation, and onboarding. Mentor team members and develop their technical judgment and leadership. - Solve critical technical problems. Contribute directly to experimental design, algorithms, software, and system architecture. Investigate failures and help the team overcome challenges that span multiple components of the robot. - Establish rigorous evaluation. Develop reproducible benchmarks and testing practices that measure performance across repeated trials, varied environments, and changing operating conditions. Use results to guide development priorities. - Collaborate across AI and neuroscience. Work with specialists to implement and test learning methods and neural circuit models on robots. Design experiments that assess both practical capability and the computational mechanisms underlying behavior. - Guide robotics hardware and resource decisions. Recommend robotic hardware, compute, and tooling investments based on technical needs and expected impact. Communicate progress, risks, and tradeoffs clearly to the lab’s leadership. DESIRED QUALIFICATIONS - Research and leadership experience. Typically 10+ years of relevant robotics research and engineering experience, including 5+ years leading technical teams or substantial robotics programs. Exceptional accomplishments may substitute for a specific number of years. - Technical contributions. A record of original work and successful delivery on physical robotic systems, supported by research publications, deployed capabilities, or substantial engineering achievements. - Robotics depth and breadth. Deep expertise in one or more areas of robotics, with broad working knowledge across perception, robot learning, simulation, motion planning, control, and deployment. - Systems judgment. Demonstrated ability to turn research prototypes into reliable, reproducible robotic capabilities and diagnose failures across software, models, sensing, and hardware. - Team development. Experience recruiting and mentoring strong researchers and engineers, setting technical standards, and coordinating work across specialties. - Cross-disciplinary collaboration. Strong grounding in modern AI and an interest in understanding and evaluating ideas from computational neuroscience. Prior neuroscience specialization is welcome but is not required. - Education or equivalent accomplishments. A PhD in robotics, computer science, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent research and technical leadership accomplishments. WHY JOIN US? This is a rare opportunity to build robust, useful robots that reliably perform real-world tasks while pursuing a deeper question: how can we give them a brain that learns, remembers, and adapts through interaction with the world? You will work alongside neuroscientists and AI researchers to translate insights from biological neural circuits and AI systems into computational architectures, then test them on physical robots. Our ambition is to build a broad repertoire of robust, task-oriented behaviors and use these capabilities to investigate how skills accumulate, how experience informs decisions, and how online learning enables robots to adapt to unfamiliar tasks. Building on our existing results and robotic systems, you will help bring these ideas into the real world. Success means both robots that perform useful tasks reliably and scientific advances in how intelligent behavior can emerge from brain-inspired computation.