Position Summary:You will lead policy pretraining-training the policies that map what a robot perceives to what it does. As a senior IC you own a core part of the pretraining stack end to end, take major training experiments from idea to trustworthy result, and set direction others build on.
Core Responsibilities:- Model Development: Design and train policy-pretraining models, owning significant parts of the architecture and training loop.
- Experimentation: Design, run, and analyze experiments; debug training dynamics; iterate quickly.
- Pipeline & Tooling: Build reusable components and drive the efficiency and reliability of the pretraining pipeline.
- Model Analysis: Investigate model behavior from data and metrics, and turn findings into concrete improvements.
- Technical Leadership: Set technical direction for pretraining and mentor MTS engineers on the stack.
Required Qualifications:- Model Training: Deep hands-on experience training deep models with strong engineering fundamentals in a modern ML framework.
- Ownership: A track record of driving ambiguous, large-scale training workstreams to a result independently.
- Data-Driven Reasoning: Comfort reasoning about model behavior from data and metrics rather than intuition alone.
- Technical Judgment: The judgment to make sound modeling and architecture trade-offs and set direction others follow.
- Leadership: Experience mentoring engineers and raising technical standards.
Preferred Qualifications:- Exposure to robotics, control, imitation learning, or VLA models.
- Experience with distributed or large-scale training.
- Contributions to influential models, papers, or open-source training stacks.
Walden Robotics offers a competitive total compensation program, including salary, annual cash bonus, company equity, company-subsidized insurance programs, 401(k) with company match, flexible PTO, daily lunch, and other benefits. The pay ranges noted on our posts are for salary only.
The pay range for this role is:
285,000 - 380,000 USD per year (BOS)
285,000 - 380,000 USD per year (SF)
