Robotics careers · Career guide

Machine learning engineerwhat the job involves, pay and who’s hiring

There are 307 open machine learning engineer roles on Robotics Connected today, at 116 employers. Where roles give pay, the middle figure is $275K a year. Below is what the work involves, the skills employers ask for, how people get in, and the roles open now.

By Olivier Ayache · Figures from the jobs board, updated
307
open machine learning engineer roles
116
employers hiring
$275K
middle pay a year, from 52 roles
15%
can be done remotely

What does a machine learning engineer do?

Machine learning engineers in robotics teach robots from data rather than writing every behaviour by hand. The field has grown quickly with foundation models for robots, imitation learning from human demonstrations and reinforcement learning in simulation.

Roles range from research scientists working on new methods to engineers who build the data pipelines, training infrastructure and evaluation that turn research into robots that work.

Also advertised as: Robot learning engineer, Research scientist, Applied scientist, AI engineer.

A typical week

  • Training and evaluating policies or models on robot data
  • Building data collection and training pipelines
  • Running experiments in simulation and on real robots
  • Reading papers and turning promising ideas into working code

Skills employers ask for

  • Python and PyTorch (or JAX)
  • Deep learning, reinforcement and imitation learning
  • Large-scale training on GPUs
  • Simulation for robot learning (Isaac, MuJoCo)
  • Enough robotics to know why a policy fails on hardware

How much do machine learning engineers earn?

  • $215K to $331K a year for the middle half, $275K in the middle, from 52 roles paid in USD

These figures come from the 56 of 307 open roles that give pay, taking the middle of each role’s range. Most are in US states where job adverts have to show pay, so they lean towards American salaries; roles in the UK and Europe rarely publish a figure.

Who is hiring machine learning engineers?

The employers with the most open machine learning engineer roles today:

Where are the jobs?

The cities with the most open machine learning engineer roles, each with its own page of robotics jobs:

And by country:

What levels are open?

177 of the 307 roles say their level in the title. They split like this:

Entry-level roles are scarce across robotics, not only in this one. I looked at why, and what I’d suggest if you’re starting out, in this article on the entry-level gap.

How to become a machine learning engineer

Research roles usually ask for a PhD or published work. Engineering roles are open to people with strong software and machine learning experience, and I'd suggest reproducing a recent robot learning paper as a project, since it shows exactly the skills these teams hire for.

If you’re early on, the robotics internships and entry-level and graduate roles are the places to start.

Open machine learning engineer jobs

The newest, one an employer:

Search the jobs board for “learning”All Robot Learning & AI roles

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