Conduit has built the system of record for the modern factory floor. We move manufacturers from one-off automation projects to holistic production systems where robots, machines, operators, sensors, and factory software synchronize. We are live with top manufacturers, are well capitalized, and are growing quickly. We are hiring the rare research-depth roboticist who wants their thesis ideas to run on a real production line instead of in a paper.

The Role

This role is for the deep-research roboticist. You have spent years thinking carefully about manipulation, perception, control theory, planning, or learned policies. You know the math. You can read a frontier paper and tell us whether it is real, what is missing, and how to make it work on a robot we already own.

The PhDs who excel at startups share something specific: iteration speed. We are looking for someone who will use their technical depth to invent the techniques the off-the-shelf stack does not have. You will also be on customer floors making them work.

What you'll do

• Bring research depth to real factory problems. Invent or adapt the technique we need — for manipulation, perception, planning, learned control, or sim-to-real — when nothing off the shelf is good enough.

• Take off-the-shelf production hardware (UR, FANUC, KUKA, ABB, Yaskawa) and generalize it with Conduit's coordination, perception, and policy logic so a single cell type deploys across many customers.

• Build the evaluation, simulation, data, and replay infrastructure that lets us actually measure whether a new method works on the real line, not just on a benchmark.

• Translate frontier work into production-grade systems. Diffusion policies, VLAs, foundation-model perception, world models, sensor fusion — whatever the problem demands — turned into code that runs in a factory.

• Spend real time onsite. The customer's plant is a research environment for you, not an inconvenience.

• Write things up internally so the rest of the team learns from your depth without having to redo your reading.

Who You Are

• PhD in robotics, ML, computer vision, controls, or a related field — or equivalent research depth demonstrated through published work, open-source projects, or in-house research output.

• You have one to five years post-PhD (or equivalent) of applied work. Long enough to have shipped, short enough that you still have research muscle.

• You have shipped something a real user depended on. A robot demo at a conference does not count. A robot running for a customer does.

• You have urgency. You measure velocity in production milestones, not in publication count. If a customer is blocked, the paper waits.

• You are fluent across the stack: classical control and learned policies; calibration, frames, planning, force control; modern ML for robotics including VLAs and diffusion policies; Python and ideally C++; ROS or ROS 2; GPU workflows.

• You are happy to debug a TCP/IP timeout to a PLC at 2pm and read a paper at 8pm.

• You are allergic to the parts of academia you got tired of: politics, slow cycles, and over-precise scoping. You want the parts you loved: depth, rigor, real measurement.

• You want to be a part of the reindustrialization of the United States.

Bonus Points

• Published work in manipulation, learning for control, perception, planning, or robot foundation models.

• Experience with NVIDIA Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, Cosmos, GR00T, MuJoCo, IsaacGym, or similar.

• Experience with OpenVLA, RT-2/RT-X, Octo, V-JEPA, Gemini Robotics, or comparable systems.

• Open-source contributions to robotics or ML infrastructure used by other people.

Conduit is where research depth turns into customer impact in weeks. If that is the kind of velocity you have been waiting for, this is the seat.

• Top tier pay and equity: We want to make it easy to join Conduit.

• Generational opportunity. Be early at a company defining the software layer for industrial automation.

• American re-industrialization is happening. We’re building the platform to make it real — faster.

• Zero bureaucracy. High impact. You’ll be on the front lines, solving real problems for real factories.

• You will level up. You’ll work directly with the founder and exec team — and grow into a senior operator

Conduit is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from all qualified candidates.

Apply here.