Foundational RL Research Scientist

Brahma Consulting Group is recruiting for a venturebacked robotics company in San Francisco building learned manipulation policies for real-world deployment. They’re hiring a research scientist to own their offline reinforcement learning research.

You’ll join a small research team and lead the offline RL direction end to end. Some problems are already defined, and there’s real room to pursue your own ideas within offline RL. Success is measured by improving policy performance on internal benchmarks and extending the existing policy research. This is a research-first seat: depth in RL methods matters far more than engineering polish.

What you’ll work on

• Developing offline RL methods that learn strong policies from large, mixed-quality robot datasets
• Value learning, including TD-based, contrastive, and goal-conditioned approaches
• Policy representation and how it scales with data
• Designing rigorous experiments and benchmarks to show what actually moves policy performance
• Turning research results into policies that run on real hardware, working with the robotics team

What they’re looking for

• One or more first-author papers at top ML venues such as ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, or CVPR
• Research focused on RL methods themselves, rather than RL applied to a specific problem
• Strong grounding in offline RL, value learning, or policy learning
• Comfort setting research direction with a high degree of ownership

Nice to have

• Goal-conditioned or contrastive RL research
• Sim-to-real experience
• Background in video or image generative models
• Research internships at strong industry labs

Robotics experience is not required. New PhD and master’s graduates with strong publications are encouraged to apply.

Probably not the right fit if

• Your RL experience is mainly LLM post-training (RLHF, RLVR, reward modeling)
• Your work is primarily applied RL without methods contributions
• You’re looking for a remote or hybrid role

Details

• On-site in San Francisco
• Salary range: $200,000 to $300,000+, plus equity
• Visa sponsorship available, including new H-1B
• Relocation support available
• Process: short intro screen, technical conversation, technical deep dive, and on-site interview