Principal Scientist, Reinforcement Learning

Your New Role and Team

Sanctuary is seeking an exceptional Principal Scientist, Reinforcement Learning (RL) to join our team in engineering and innovating unique robotic manipulation tasks.

As a Principal Scientist, you'll be responsible for selecting the most promising state of the art (SOTA) approaches, designing training and data-collection pipelines, supervising the process of testing these algorithms in simulation, and deploying them to our robots in real-world settings. With access to in-house robots, you'll also have a unique opportunity for impactful work with new haptic and proprioceptive sensing modalities.

Success Criteria

• Design, implement, and improve SOTA RL algorithms and test them in real-world settings
• Identify, communicate, and drive promising research directions to the team
• Design RL training and data-collection pipelines to facilitate fast deployment on physical robots
• Keep up to date with SOTA RL methodologies and robotics
• Work with a multidisciplinary team to develop novel algorithms and investigate sources of errors with existing implementations
• Find ways of improving existing implementations of RL learning pipelines with regards to standard metrics such as sample efficiency, speed, computational resource usage, and scalability

Qualifications

Your Experience

• 4+ years' experience implementing a variety of ML methods with a focus in a specialization such as computer vision or robotics
• Experience in simulation-to-reality transfer learning
• Experience taking ML R&D and trained models into production
• PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Applied Math, or equivalent work experience in ML
• 2+ years' experience implementing and deploying (dexterous) robotic manipulation tasks in simulation and on physical robots
• Hands-on experience integrating ML models onto a robotics platform
• Publications in leading AI conferences such as Neurips, ICLR, ICML and CORL
• Experience with computer vision systems

Skills

• Experience with Atlassian tools; Jira, Confluence, or equivalent i.e. GitLab
• Development with Python 3.6 or later
• Familiarity with ROS2
• Working knowledge of PyTorch and/or TensorFlow
• Extensive knowledge of Reinforcement Learning principles and use

Traits

• Ability to drive development of new functionalities from concept to production
• Strong leadership skills in organizing R&D work for ML projects
• Eager to take on new challenges with tenacity and positivity
• Patience, persistence, and attention to detail when resolving performance issues
• Above all else, a consistently positive attitude and a willingness to do whatever it takes to create robust solutions to complex problems
• Ability to multitask and prioritize in a fast paced environment
• Enthusiasm for bringing human-like intelligence to machines

** Please do not submit any information that is confidential to you or any third party. By submitting an application, you acknowledge and agree that your application does not contain any information that is confidential to you or any third party. **

Working at Sanctuary

Sanctuary is an equal opportunity employer; employment with Sanctuary is governed based on skills, competence, and qualifications and will not be influenced in any way by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability, or any other legally protected status.

Benefits

Full time employees enjoy medical/dental/vision, life insurance, wellness programs, stock options, paid time off (vacation, paid holidays, sick time, and parental leave), scheduling and worksite flexibility by role, and more.

About Sanctuary

Founded in 2018 by Geordie Rose, Suzanne Gildert, Olivia Norton, and Ajay Agrawal, Sanctuary is a Vancouver, Canada-based company. Sanctuary is on a mission to create the world’s first human-like intelligence in general-purpose robots that will help us work more safely, efficiently, and sustainably. And in the not-too-distant future, help us explore, settle, and prosper in outer space.

Members of the Sanctuary team founded D-Wave (a pioneer in the quantum computing industry), Kindred (first use of reinforcement learning in a production robot), and the Creative Destruction Lab (pioneered a revolutionary method for the commercialization of science for the betterment of humankind). The team has experience launching market-defining innovations rooted in previously unsolved and deep scientific problems.

Recruiting & Employment Agency Notice:

Recruitment and hiring is conducted internally by Sanctuary. We are not seeking or soliciting any new agency partnerships or agreements at this time. Any employment agency or professional recruiter (“Agency”) that provides an unsolicited resume(s) or otherwise presents a prospective job candidate through the Sanctuary career site or directly to any Sanctuary employee, irrevocably grants to Sanctuary the unrestricted right to engage, hire, or contract with that candidate at Sanctuary’s sole discretion without any compensation to the Agency. We appreciate your interest in working together, and should the need arise our Talent Acquisition team will contact any external firms directly.