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Founding Research Engineer - Mobile Manipulation

Palo Alto, CA
Full-time, on-site

Who are we

Sancho Robotics builds general-purpose mobile manipulators for advanced manufacturing. Our work was featured in the opening of the NVIDIA GTC 2026 keynote. Backed by $7 million in funding, our team has won multiple best-paper awards at top robotics conferences such as RSS and IROS and brings a decade of real-world robotics deployment experience.

As a core founding member, you'll define and build the mobile manipulation software stack,

making the robot move and manipulate objects safely and robustly in dynamic, unstructured environments.

What you will do

Develop Mobile Manipulation Policies: Design and implement policies that enable a

mobile manipulator to perform generalizable skills such as grasping, insertion, and tool

use.

Develop Control & Recovery Strategies: Develop robust control, compliance, and

recovery strategies for contact-rich manipulation on hardware.

Data Collection & Policy Deployment: Train, evaluate, and deploy robot policies using

teleoperation data, robot logs, and simulation.

Task Iteration: Systematically improve task success rates and expand platform

generalizability through rigorous testing and failure analysis.

What you will bring

* Hands-on experience deploying robotic manipulation policies on real-world robot systems.

* Strong robotics fundamentals in kinematics, control, motion planning, and trajectory optimization.

* Experience in C++, ROS/ROS2, and simulators like MuJoCo or Isaac Lab.

* Sound technical judgment about when to use a math- or data-driven approach

Tell us a bit about you

What interests you about joining Sancho?

Is there anything else you'd like to share?

Your resume