Robotics Machine Learning Engineer

Department: Persona AI

Location: Pensacola, FL or Houston, TX

Employment Type: FullTime

Persona AI is developing and commercializing rugged, multi-purpose humanoid robots that perform real work. Persona’s founding team has a decades-long history in humanoid robotics, bionics, and product development delivering robust hardware that has touched the stars, worked miles below the surface of the ocean, and even roamed Disney Parks. Our mission is focused squarely on shipping beautiful, reliable products at massive scale, while building a customer-focused team to achieve these aims.

We're looking for a Machine Learning Engineer to drive our machine learning strategy. We are primarily interested in candidates who have developed and released products to market, but can be flexible depending on aptitude and energy. 

As one of the inaugural Machine Learning Engineers at Persona, you will have an incredible opportunity to get in at the beginning to shape the design and development of Persona’s humanoid robot. 

Your Role:

• Collaborate on the design and development of the Persona ML software stack and support its application in manipulation, navigation, locomotion, and perception.

• Work with the ML team to craft and execute on a comprehensive plan for the development of machine learning models, keeping up to date with the state of the art in research and development.

• Work with the team to develop, test, and deploy software, machine learning pipelines, and data collection pipelines.

• Monitor and evaluate the performance of models in the real world.

• Collaborate with Universities and other companies.

• Collaborate in attracting, nurturing and growing the machine learning and autonomy teams.

We're Looking For:

• Courage and grit to tackle some of the hardest problems in embodied AI.

• Enthusiasm for working collaboratively in a high paced team environment.

• 3+ years of experience in machine learning applied to robotics.

• Experience with deep learning frameworks (Pytorch, JAX, TensorFlow, etc.)

• Experience with cloud computing to develop models, store data, etc. (AWS, Azure, GCP)

• Strong understanding of the state of the art research in robot learning (behavior cloning for manipulation, reinforcement learning for locomotion, world models, etc.).

• Understanding of the challenges of deploying neural network models in the real world.

• Experienced in deploying both traditional and learning based approaches for robotics.

• Capable of writing high quality software.

• Thrive in fast paced and ambiguous environments.

• Strong first principles thinker.

Preferred or Bonus Qualifications:

• An advanced degree (Masters or PhD) in computer science, robotics, machine learning, or another related field.

• Published papers at top ML/Robotics conferences (ICML, ICRA, CoRL, RSS, NeurIPS).

• Have deployed robots, collected large amounts of data, and trained large neural networks that work in production environments.

Why join Persona AI?

• You'll shape technology that's redefining the possibilities of robotics and human interaction.

• Work alongside passionate teammates who value diversity, creativity, and continuous learning.

• Enjoy full access to advanced prototyping tools, labs, and the freedom to experiment and innovate.

• We offer competitive compensation, excellent benefits, flexible work environment, and equity opportunities.

Persona AI embraces diversity and equal opportunity in a serious way. We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. We believe the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be.