ML Engineer / Research Engineer (Contractor)

Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Department: Engineering

Workplace: remote

Employment Type: contract

Description

Maneva is pioneering the development of AI systems for manufacturing operations, leveraging vision and production data to reduce downtime, enhance quality, and improve worker safety through actionable automation on the factory floor. As a contractor ML Engineer / Research Engineer, you will play a key role in advancing our research and engineering efforts, collaborating closely with a lead researcher and interfacing with robotics engineers to deliver impactful solutions for industrial automation.

Key responsibilities include:

• Collaborate with a lead researcher on modeling decisions, structured experiments, and paper development
• Implement and maintain policy training code for methods such as ACT, Diffusion Policy, Pi0 fine-tuning/OpenPi, and relevant baselines
• Independently read and implement new methods from recent papers
• Run ablation sweeps, generate comparison tables/plots, and analyze experimental results
• Maintain an evaluation harness to ensure reproducibility across runs
• Conduct literature sweeps and organize related-work documentation
• Draft and iterate on methods, experiments, and related-work sections for technical writing
• Review training code from robotics engineers as needed

Requirements

Required Qualifications:

• MS, PhD in Machine Learning, Robotics, Computer Science, or a closely related field
• 2–5 years of industry experience as an ML engineer
• At least one first- or co-author paper published at a credible ML or robotics venue (e.g., CoRL, RSS, ICRA, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR)
• Strong proficiency with PyTorch and distributed training for ML models
• Hands-on experience with imitation learning, reinforcement learning, or vision-language-action (VLA) methods for sequential decision-making
• Proficiency with Docker for reproducible ML and research workflows
• Ability to design and structure ablation studies for ML experiments
• Ability to read recent ML/robotics papers and implement methods independently

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience fine-tuning vision-language-action (VLA) models
• Robotics manipulation background
• Contributions to OpenPi or LeRobot projects
• Familiarity with advanced ML research workflows
• Experience collaborating with cross-disciplinary teams in industrial automation

Benefits

Why Join Maneva? 

• Work with cutting-edge Vision AI & IoT solutions that power autonomous manufacturing, robotics, and industrial automation​. 

• Opportunity to lead in a fast-growing AI company driving real-world impact in industrial AI adoption​. 
• Collaborate with world-class engineers & AI experts in a dynamic, innovation-driven environment. 

Important Notice: Protecting Your Personal Information 

We are committed to ensuring the security and privacy of all applicants. Please be aware that our company will never ask for sensitive personal information, via email, phone call or text message. We also do not require payment from applicants for any part of the hiring process. 

If you are contacted by someone claiming to represent our company and asking for such information, please do not respond. Instead, report the incident to us immediately at [email protected].