Research Assistant
San Francisco Bay Area (San Mateo) or Boston (Somerville)$150k - $200kFull-timePosted 3mo ago
About the role
Entry-level research role focusing on designing, running, and analyzing experiments at the intersection of machine learning and robotics. Aims to improve the feedback loop for building foundation models for robots, with emphasis on experimental design, repeatability, and statistical rigor.
Responsibilities
- Running structured experiments on robot platforms
- Setting up physical tasks, materials, fixtures, and benchmarks for robot evaluations
- Collecting high-quality robot data and tracking experimental conditions
- Measuring real-world success rates across tasks, robots, and model variants
- Designing evaluations with attention to controls, repeatability, statistical rigor, and sources of bias
- Analyzing results to help distinguish real model improvements from noise
- Synthesizing findings and communicating them clearly to ML researchers and engineers
- Preparing robots, sensors, workspaces, and materials for rollouts and evaluations
- Helping kick off training jobs, run evaluations, and organize results
- Beta testing internal and third-party tools for teaching robots new skills
- Troubleshooting physical setups, hardware issues, and procedural bottlenecks
- Writing clear documentation and playbooks so others can reproduce workflows
- Improving experimental reliability, data quality, and operational throughput over time
Qualifications
- Have experience running experiments, lab studies, field studies, data collection workflows, or structured evaluations
- Think carefully about experimental design, confounding factors, controls, sample sizes, variance, and what conclusions the data can actually support
- Are diligent and detail-oriented, especially when tasks are repetitive but subtle differences matter
- Enjoy hands-on work with physical systems, equipment, materials, or instruments
- Are comfortable following protocols while also noticing when something is wrong or could be improved
- Can coordinate many moving parts: robots, materials, tasks, data, model versions, metrics, and documentation
- Communicate clearly and can summarize what happened, what changed, and what the evidence suggests
- Are curious about machine learning and robotics, even if you are not yet an expert in either
- Have some exposure to programming, data analysis, robotics, hardware, electronics, mechanical assembly, or experimental tooling
- Prefer fast iteration, careful measurement, and empirical progress over abstract theory alone
Skills
Required:Experiment design and analysisData collection and curationRobotics hardware and lab equipmentCommunication and documentation
Last updated Oct 6, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
About Generalist AI
Generalist is a frontier AI research and product driven company building general intelligence for the physical world.
Generalist AI: a frontier AI research and product driven company building general intelligence for the physical world.
AIGEN-1PRODUCTSVLAsembodied AIembodied intelligencegeneral-purposegeneral-purpose AI
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