Founding Research Engineer - Mobile Manipulation

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.

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.

* 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