Howdy y’all,
We’re Lumen Labs, a funded pre-seed physical AI startup in San Francisco. Nearly every major robotics effort today teaches machines.
by showing them thousands of hours of human teleoperation. We think that paradigm has a ceiling, and that the path to robots that genuinely adapt runs through a different kind of learning. We’re primarily focused on nature-inspired AI architectures for unstructured environments (construction sites, mining, oil pipelines, battlefield).
We’re a team of two and hiring someone to own the hardware and infrastructure that keeps our research platforms running. This means maintaining and extending ROS2 (Humble) nodes across onboard and offboard compute, integrating and calibrating sensors, owning the safety pipeline during autonomous runs, and keeping the data logging pipeline clean and reliable.
The other half of the job is sim2real. You won’t need to set up the sims yourself, but you’ll be the one getting trained policies onto real hardware and figuring out where the robot and environment differ from the sim. Here’s where we’re at today, zero-shot sim2real transfer, policy that can run at 100Hz on an ESP32, under a day to train:
You’ll thrive here if you’ve built and run real robots of more than one kind, and have done off-the-beaten-path side projects along the way.
In-person in San Francisco. Competitive salary + equity, health insurance, and visa/relocation support for the right candidate.
Send us a note at hi@lumenresearch.co or reply to this post telling us a bit about you, projects you’ve worked on, and why you’d want to work at Lumen. If you can link us to a project where you got a trained policy running on real hardware, your application will move to the top of our pile. I’ll be at ROSCON 2026 and at Pittsburgh Robotics and AI Discovery Day. Feel free to message if you want to chat in person at either one.
-Daniel