Machine Learning Engineer

Join Toyota Research Institute: Machine Learning Engineer Opportunity

At Toyota Research Institute (TRI), we are committed to enhancing the quality of human life by creating innovative tools and technologies that amplify the human experience. Our world-class team excels in Energy & Materials, Human-Centered AI, Human Interactive Driving, and Robotics to lead this transformative shift in mobility.

The Mission

Our mission is to make general-purpose robots a reality through large-scale embodied AI.

The Challenge

We envision a future where robots assist with household chores, cooking, help the elderly maintain their independence, and enable people to engage more in activities they love. To achieve this, our goal is to create robots that operate reliably in messy, unstructured environments. We are dedicated to answering the question: “What will it take to create truly general-purpose robots capable of a wide range of tasks in settings like human homes with minimal supervision?” We are gathering extensive datasets involving physical interactions from various sources, including robots and humans, and training large generative foundation models using this interaction data alongside language, video, audio, and other rich modalities.

The Team

Our goal is to revolutionize robotic manipulation, enabling long-horizon dexterous behaviors to be efficiently taught, learned, and improved over time in diverse, real-world environments. Our team possesses deep cross-functional expertise across simulation, perception, controls, language, vision, multimodal learning, and generative modeling. Success is measured by the advancement of robot capabilities, and we strongly support open research. Our guiding star is to achieve fundamental technological advancements in building robots that can flexibly perform various tasks in diverse environments with minimal human supervision. Join us in making general-purpose robots a reality.

The Opportunity

We seek a driven machine learning engineer who is adept at working with large integrated machine learning systems. Experience with robots or other embodied systems (such as autonomous vehicles) is a plus.

If you resonate with our mission of revolutionizing robotics through machine learning, get in touch with us, and let's discuss how we can create the next generation of AI-powered capable robots together.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with internal research scientists and partner labs at top academic universities (MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, CMU, Columbia, Princeton) to drive pioneering research.
• Build, improve, and solidify end-to-end integrated ML pipelines for training multimodal models (language, images, video, actions) at scale.
• Train, finetune, and serve robot foundation models with a strong MLOps mindset.
• Develop processes for integrating collaboration-produced and open-source advancements and code into our internal stack.
• Construct and enhance large data pipelines for foundation model training.
• Be a key team member and contribute significantly to rapid progress measured by the development of internal capabilities and impactful external publications.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of professional ML engineering experience within an AI/ML-focused organization.
• Familiarity with cutting-edge behavior learning, language, and/or computer vision methodologies.
• Experience training large-scale foundation models (VLMs, text-to-video models) using techniques such as quantization, mixed precision, model parallelism, data parallelism, or FSDP.
• Extensive practical experience with PyTorch.
• Strong proficiency in Python and software development best practices (unit testing, documentation, code review, continuous integration, dependency management).
• Knowledge of data pipelines, model serving and optimization, cloud training, and dataset management.
• Ability to switch between rapid prototyping and robust implementation as needed.

Nice to Haves

• Experience deploying models on embodied systems/robots.
• Experience collaborating in mixed teams of research scientists and engineers.
• Experience with Amazon EC2, S3, and/or Sagemaker.
• Experience with Bazel.

The pay range for this position at the commencement of employment is between $165,760 and $238,280/year for California-based roles. Base pay may vary based on multiple factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. TRI offers a generous benefits package, including 401(k) eligibility, various paid time off benefits (vacation, sick time, parental leave), and an annual cash bonus structure.