Research Engineer – Robot Learning & Manipulation

About the role

The Singapore Institute of Technology seeks a Research Engineer to advance robot learning and manipulation for aviation applications. You will work on end‑to‑end pipelines, from data collection to policy deployment on real robotic platforms.

Key responsibilities

• Develop and evaluate learning‑based manipulation methods such as imitation learning, reinforcement learning and diffusion policies for contact‑rich tasks.
• Own the full robot learning pipeline: data collection, dataset preparation, policy training, evaluation, real‑robot deployment and iterative improvement.
• Design and implement real‑world data collection pipelines using teleoperation, ensuring proper sensing, synchronization, logging and data quality control.
• Integrate robot hardware, sensors, compute platforms, perception, motion planning and learning components into robust systems.
• Conduct laboratory and field evaluations, benchmark performance, analyse failures and improve reliability.

Required profile

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in Robotics, Computer Science, Mechanical/Electrical Engineering, Control, AI or related field.
• Hands‑on experience with physical robotic systems and ROS/ROS 2.
• Demonstrated ability to develop and deploy learning‑based manipulation methods on real robots.
• Experience collecting and using real‑world demonstration data via teleoperation or similar human‑in‑the‑loop methods.

Required skills

• Python programming, PyTorch, C++.
• ROS / ROS 2, motion planning, calibration, trajectory execution.
• Imitation learning, behavioural cloning, diffusion policies, reinforcement learning.
• Robotics simulation environments such as Isaac Sim / Isaac Lab, MuJoCo, Gazebo.