# Senior Robotic Foundation Model Engineer \(human\) - Company: [Neura Robotics Gmbh]() - Location: Metzingen / Riederich - Team: AI - Employment type: Full Time - Posted: May 26, 2026 ## Job description # Your Mission & Challenges * **Own the outcome on the robot:** Drive the development of cognitive robotics applications through Physical AI and the NeuraGym platform — you own the outcome on the customer's robot, not just the model in the repo. * **Execute the full pipeline:** Take foundation models to production-ready robotic intelligence by executing the complete NeuraGym pipeline — teleoperation, data annotation, training, simulation, deployment, and validation — tailored to real-world robotics applications. Define the data strategy that makes a fine-tune work and own the full post-training loop including hyperparameter iteration, data mixture, LoRA, and honest evaluation. * **Deploy to real-time control:** Take policies from checkpoint to real-time closed-loop control — distillation, quantization, action chunking, latency budgets, and on-device/edge inference under the customer's cycle time and reliability requirements. * **Master the full robotics stack:** Work across NEURA OS and the control layer — real-time control, kinematics, motion planning, force/impedance control, and the safety architecture — and integrate learned policies cleanly with the low-level controller instead of treating it as a black box. * **Hands-on system integration:** Work directly on MAiRA, MiPA, LARA, and humanoid platforms alongside multidisciplinary engineering teams — end-effectors and tool changers, sensor selection and mounting, calibration, electrical and fieldbus interfaces, and the mechanical reality of the cell. * **Enable and support customers:** Guide and onboard users to NeuraGym by reviewing training pipelines and scripts, identifying data quality issues, troubleshooting model behavior, and providing hands-on support to resolve persistent blockers. * **Cross-functional collaboration:** Serve as a key interface between Cloud and AI teams, ensuring smooth collaboration, technical alignment, and efficient problem-solving across domains. * **Build evaluation rigor:** Create the eval harnesses, success-rate benchmarks, and regression tests that decide whether a policy is ready for handover — and make failure modes visible before the customer finds them. * **Research to production:** Prototype techniques from recent papers together with the research team and bring the ones that survive contact with reality into production deployments. * **Close the feedback loop:** Translate field experience and customer insights into actionable feedback for both the NeuraGym product roadmap and the NEURA core AI roadmap. # What We Can Look Forward To * **Your education:** Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a related field. * **ML in robotics depth:** 5+ years of hands-on machine-learning experience in robotics — strong in at least one of vision-based manipulation, reinforcement/imitation learning, or multimodal models, and keen to learn the rest. * **Fine-tuning expertise:** Demonstrable experience fine-tuning large pretrained models for robotics or another domain: PEFT/LoRA and full fine-tunes, dataset curation, distillation, and evaluation. Familiarity with the open VLA and policy-learning ecosystem (e.g., π0/π0.5, OpenVLA, LeRobot, diffusion policies) is a strong plus. * **Programming skills:** Solid Python skills (C++ is a plus); practical experience with PyTorch or TensorFlow. * **Cloud and simulation:** AWS, Azure, or GCP experience and familiarity with robotic simulation tools (IsaacSim, MuJoCo, etc.) are pluses. * **Robotics software stack:** Working command of a robotics software stack beyond the model layer — robot operating systems and middleware (NEURA OS, ROS/ROS2 or comparable), real-time control, kinematics and motion planning, force/impedance control, and how a learned policy wires into a low-level controller and its safety layer. * **Hardware literacy:** Solid understanding of robot hardware — drives and joint modules, torque sensing and encoders, end-effectors, sensor integration, calibration, electrical and fieldbus interfaces (e.g., EtherCAT), and functional safety concepts — enough to distinguish a model problem from a machine problem on site. * **Execution mindset:** Proven problem-solving abilities, ability to handle multiple projects in parallel, and a strong bias toward execution and personal commitment. You take deployments personally, work through setbacks, and measure yourself by what runs at the customer. * **Communication:** Clear communicator who translates between researchers, engineers, and end-users. You have solid command of English and German (B2–C1 level). * **Travel readiness:** Willingness to travel frequently to customer sites and NeuraGyms (approximately 40–60%). ## Apply [Apply on Neura Robotics Gmbh]() Canonical job page: