Staff Engineer, Deep Learning Manipulation

Job Title: Staff Engineer, Deep Learning Manipulation

Department: Software Engineering

Employment Type: Full-Time

FLSA Status: Exempt

Location: Houston, TX

Travel: 10%

Who We Are

Persona AI is building humanoid robots for the most demanding environments in heavy industry — shipyards, steel mills, fabrication facilities, and offshore platforms — performing welding, grinding, maintenance, inspection, and material-handling work that is dangerous, physically demanding, and increasingly difficult to staff.

We are backed by leading strategic and financial investors and engaged with global industrial leaders across Korea, Japan, the United States, and Singapore. Korea is the center of gravity for our early commercial strategy, anchored by relationships with the world’s leading shipbuilders and steelmakers. Our work spans both the robot platform itself and the systems, partners, and playbooks required to deploy it at scale.

Why Join Persona AI?

We offer competitive compensation, a performance-based bonus, 100% employer covered medical benefits for most healthcare plans, early-stage equity, competitive PTO, and company-wide paid winter break between December 24th and January 2nd.

You’ll shape technology that’s redefining the possibilities of robotics and human interaction.

Work alongside passionate teammates who value creativity, and continuous learning.

About the Role

We're looking for a Staff Deep Learning, Robot Manipulation Engineer to help build and execute Persona AI's robot learning capability and roadmap. We're looking for exceptional talent who dream big, thrive on challenges, and love seeing their efforts make an impact on Persona’s humanoid robots doing real work in real-world environments.

You will drive and implement Persona’s learning-based manipulation direction, research and establish the best learning formula for Persona’s humanoid use cases such as welding and grinding, and continuously improve the robot fleet’s performance to achieve industrial-level robustness.

If you want to push the boundary of humanoid robot capability performing real-world tasks, this role is for you.

What You Will Be Doing

Design and implement advanced robot learning models and training procedures to achieve dexterous manipulation for humanoid robots with high DOF and multi-fingered hands.

Own the ML manipulation pipeline and roadmap, combining different learning paradigms to achieve real-world, industrial-level robustness.

Work with the Teleoperation and Data team to design data collection, sensor modularity, and data mixture strategies.

Leverage existing state-of-the-art manipulation models and contribute to the development of new architectures for emerging complex tasks.

Deploy trained manipulation models to robotic hardware, ensuring real-time performance, safety, and integration with control systems and sensors.

Keep up to date with the state of the art in ML research and development.

Develop and execute evaluation pipelines to rigorously test learned manipulation models, including real-world trials and simulation, measuring performance, robustness, and generalization across tasks and environments.

Collaborate in attracting, nurturing, and growing the machine learning team.

What We Are Looking For:

5+ years of experience applying deep learning techniques to robotic manipulation in industrial settings.

Master's or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, or a related field.

Courage and grit to tackle some of the most challenging problems in robot manipulation.

Strong understanding and proficiency with state-of-the-art algorithms and best practices in behavior cloning, reinforcement learning, vision-language-action models, foundation models, etc.

Experience with cloud computing and large-scale datasets.

Capable of writing high-quality software in Python, C++, or Rust.

Bonus Skills:

Experience with other aspects of ML applied to robotics, including robot simulation, locomotion, computer vision, robot hardware, and sensors.

Published papers at top ML/Robotics conferences (ICML, ICRA, CoRL, RSS, NeurIPS, etc.).

Have trained models and deployed them to robots in production environments.

Persona AI is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.