The role
From Figure's own posting.
Figure is an AI Robotics company autonomous general-purpose humanoid robots. The goal of the company is to ship humanoid robots with human level intelligence. Its robots are engineered to perform a variety of tasks in the home and commercial markets. We are based in North San Jose, CA and require 5 days/week in-office collaboration. It’s time to build.
We’re looking for an engineer to own the training and deployment backbone behind our RL-based whole-body control systems. This role sits at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, controls, and software systems engineering, and is critical to how quickly we can iterate, train, and deploy new capability to our fleet of humanoid robots.
Key Responsibilities:
Own and scale the infrastructure used to train whole-body control policies (simulation, data pipelines, orchestration, visualizations)
Design systems that are fast, reliable, and highly configurable for our controls engineers
Ensure high cluster utilization and minimal downtime—unblocking the team and accelerating iteration cycles
Evaluate and integrate physics engines, simulation environments, and parameterizations to balance realism and training speed
Optimize hyperparameters and infrastructure to maximize training speed and efficiency and final model performance
Build robust tooling to take policies from training → validation → deployment on hardware
Requirements:
Strong software engineering fundamentals with production experience in Python and PyTorch
Experience building or scaling training infrastructure for robotics, control systems, or large-scale ML workloads
Familiarity with physics simulation tools such as NVIDIA PhysX, MuJoCo, Warp, or PyBullet
Working knowledge of dynamics, controls, and robotics systems
Experience with reinforcement learning, imitation learning, or policy distillation
Strong ownership mindset—you own systems that your teammates rely on every day
Experience modeling contact interactions and photorealistic simulation environments for complex manipulation tasks
Bonus Qualifications:
Experience with humanoid or legged robot control
Background in distributed systems, job schedulers, or cluster management
Experience deploying ML models or control policies to real-world systems
The US base salary range for this full-time position is between $150,000 and $300,000 annually.
The pay offered for this position may vary based on several individual factors, including job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. The total compensation package may also include additional components/benefits depending on the specific role. This information will be shared if an employment offer is extended.