Astera Institute is a private foundation supporting ambitious work in science and technology through grants, investments, and in-house research. Its research programs combine the pace and autonomy of a startup with the freedom to pursue difficult scientific questions. Learn more about Astera’s mission at astera.org/vision.
We are building a frontier robotics lab at Astera Institute. We believe neuroscience and AI will converge in embodied intelligence: animals and robots face shared challenges of perceiving their surroundings, navigating, manipulating objects, and using memory and reasoning to accomplish tasks in the physical world. Robotics provides a powerful testbed for investigating how biological neural circuits solve these challenges and for developing AI systems that turn perception, learning, and cognition into effective action.
Our strategy starts with making robots useful, while developing a mechanistic understanding of how neural circuits can generate intelligent behavior. We aim to continually expand the repertoire of behaviors a robot can perform reliably in real environments, while improving its ability to learn new skills, adapt to changing conditions, and recover from failure. These practical capabilities provide both measurable outcomes and a foundation for investigating deeper principles of intelligence.
Building on our existing research results and working robotic systems, we are seeking a few senior roboticists to advance our robotics capabilities and lead technical execution.
You will contribute to the robotics research and engineering effort within a multidisciplinary team spanning robotics, AI, and computational neuroscience. Your focus will be advancing robot capabilities, coordinating execution across the robotics stack, and translating research into reliable performance on physical systems.
Working closely with the lab’s leadership, you will turn scientific priorities into concrete robotics programs, recruit and mentor robotics researchers and engineers, and establish rigorous technical standards. You will bring deep robotics expertise and the ability to collaborate with colleagues in AI and neuroscience, connecting their contributions to functioning robotic systems.
This is a hands-on leadership role on research and/or engineering. You should be comfortable evaluating a learning architecture, reviewing a control or perception pipeline, designing a decisive experiment, and working directly with the team to resolve difficult technical bottlenecks.
This is a rare opportunity to build robust, useful robots that reliably perform real-world tasks while pursuing a deeper question: how can we give them a brain that learns, remembers, and adapts through interaction with the world?
You will work alongside neuroscientists and AI researchers to translate insights from biological neural circuits and AI systems into computational architectures, then test them on physical robots. Our ambition is to build a broad repertoire of robust, task-oriented behaviors and use these capabilities to investigate how skills accumulate, how experience informs decisions, and how online learning enables robots to adapt to unfamiliar tasks.
Building on our existing results and robotic systems, you will help bring these ideas into the real world. Success means both robots that perform useful tasks reliably and scientific advances in how intelligent behavior can emerge from brain-inspired computation.
Astera Institute was created to bring humanity the greatest imaginable good in the most efficient possible way. By incubating high leverage ideas in their earliest stages, Astera seeks to effect change at a systemic level via entrepreneurial experimentation. We focus on overlooked areas and invest in founders who can jumpstart initiatives and create a snowball effect.
