Senior Robotics Engineer, Robot Learning

Employer description

At Senra Systems, we're building a new model for complex manufacturing, starting with electrical wire harnesses. We're a real manufacturer, not a lab: we build harnesses on our own production lines for some of the largest aerospace and defense companies in the country. Long term, automating this work is how we help bring complex manufacturing back to the U.S. 

We're looking for a Senior Robotics Engineer to own the technical implementation of robot learning in our Automation Program. High-mix assembly is one of the hardest problems in manufacturing and has long resisted automation: deformable wire, small parts, and work that changes from job to job. Fixtured, programmed cells handle what they can. You'll take on the rest with learning-based methods, starting with tasks where parts vary from job to job, such as machine tending, and building toward dexterous wire manipulation. We buy robot arms, hands, and base models and build what is specific to harnesses: the data, the training, and the skills. Real hardware, on a real line, in real production. 

This is a hands-on senior role on a small team with aggressive goals. You'll report to one of Senra's cofounders, our Head of AI & Robotics, who owns the technical vision for the program. You'll partner with the other senior engineers on the team to execute it, and help shape where it goes as we build. It's a lot of work, with a lot of ownership, and what you build goes onto the line fast. 

You'll work closely with our Senior Robotics Engineer, Production to develop and deploy robotic capabilities on the factory floor. Your focus will be on robot learning, perception, and manipulation, using real production data to improve performance and address failure modes. The goal is to build systems that work reliably in production, not just demonstrate capabilities in the lab. 

What you'll own: 

• Learned manipulation on our production line, from research to a skill running on real work, starting with machine tending: picking, loading, and feeding wire and parts that vary from job to job 

• Feeding what you learn back to production: learned skills, perception and grasping models, and failure analysis, handed to our Senior Robotics Engineer, Production to fold into cells on the line 

• The data pipeline for learned skills: demonstrations from teleoperation and station cameras, production data from our cells, labeling, and training and evaluation pipelines 

• Dexterous and wire-manipulation research on the tasks that have resisted automation: small parts, deformable wire, and contact-rich assembly 

• Model strategy: evaluating and post-training open-weight and partner robot foundation models on our data, and recommending where we build and where we buy 

• Partner pilots on robotic hands and models, run on our terms, with our data and results staying with Senra 

• A quarterly research plan, set with our Head of AI & Robotics, with clear deliverables and go or no-go criteria for each task 

• Helping hire and mentor the engineers who join as the team grows 

What you'll bring to the team: 

Required: 

• Hands-on experience training and deploying learning-based manipulation on real robots (e.g., imitation learning, diffusion or transformer policies, reinforcement learning, robot foundation models), not only in simulation 

• Experience building the data side: teleoperation or demonstration collection, data pipelines, and evaluation on hardware 

• A track record at a robotics research lab, a frontier robotics company, or a team shipping learned robotic systems, including work you led 

• Experience with contact-rich or deformable-object manipulation (e.g., cables, insertion, cloth) 

• A track record of moving quickly on real hardware: experiments that answer a question in days, not months 

• Strong Python and a deep learning framework such as PyTorch or JAX; comfortable in C++ and with ROS 2 or similar on real robots 

• Self-starter who takes ownership of a technical area end to end, partners well with other senior engineers, and communicates clearly with technicians, engineers, and leadership 

• Master's or PhD in robotics, computer science, or mechanical, electrical, or computer engineering, or equivalent research or industry experience 

• Must be a U.S. Person as defined under ITAR (see ITAR requirements below) 

Preferred: 

• Learned skills shipped into a production or commercial setting, working alongside the engineers who run them 

• Dexterous hands, tactile sensing, or force-controlled manipulation 

• Sim-to-real transfer and simulation (e.g., MuJoCo, Isaac Sim) 

• Publications or open-source work in robot learning 

• Experience in wire harness, cable assembly, or other high-mix assembly 

• Startup or high-growth company experience 

• Experience mentoring engineers or helping build a research team 

Success in This Role Looks Like (6–12 Months): 

• A learned machine-tending skill is running on one of our wire machines alongside programmed tending, with a measured success rate on real jobs 

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