Boston Dynamics

Boston Dynamics

Research Scientist, VLA Models - Atlas

Waltham Office (POST), USA

Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 34 days ago
PythonC++Machine LearningPyTorchRoboticsResearchCollaboration

About the role

  • As a VLA Research Scientist on the Atlas team, you will architect, train, and deploy the large-scale behavior models that enable high-performance dexterous manipulation on Atlas.

Responsibilities

  • You'll collaborate closely with robotics, controls, and software teams, and rapidly test your work on state-of-the-art humanoid hardware.

Requirements

  • Experience with modern ML frameworks (PyTorch, JAX) and large-scale training workflows.

Nice to have

  • Hands-on experience deploying learned policies on real robots.
  • Experience creating or curating large demonstration datasets (teleop, human demos, ego-centric video).
  • Publications in top-tier ML or robotics conferences (e.g., CoRL, RSS, ICRA, NeurIPS).
  • Experience contributing to large C++ or Python codebases.
  • Direct access to an advanced humanoid robot-test your models on hardware quickly and often.
  • A collaborative, inclusive team that values diverse perspectives and identities.
  • The opportunity to do applied VLA research with real-world impact.
  • A mission-focused environment where your work will define the future of general-purpose humanoids.

Skills

  • Architect and train end-to-end VLA and Large Behavior Models for mobile manipulation on Atlas.
  • Integrate your models into Atlas's autonomy stack in collaboration with controls and platform teams.
  • Deploy, debug, and iterate your models directly on physical hardware.
  • Write high-quality, maintainable Python and C++ code that fits into a large production codebase.

Benefits

  • Your work will focus on building models that take multimodal input (vision, language, task context, robot state), and produce grounded actions that generalize across manipulation tasks, embodiments, and environments.
  • You will design large-scale behavior cloning and imitation learning pipelines, build hierarchical skill systems, and integrate learned components into a complex, real-world robotic system.
  • Behavior cloning / imitation learning
  • Multimodal (vision/language/action) learning

This listing is sourced directly from Boston Dynamics's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.