---
title: 'AI Research Scientist (Robot Learning) at Mimic Robotics'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/ai-research-scientist-robot-learning-mimic-robotics-zurich-qmfd7e79zmqb'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-09'
---

# AI Research Scientist (Robot Learning) at Mimic Robotics

- **Company:** Mimic Robotics
- **Location:** Zurich, Switzerland
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2025-05-28
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/mimicrobotics-com/am9icG9zdDp4kHJkgcnfMbwa-tUElmqv

## Job description

mimic is an early stage deep tech robotics & AI start-up based in Zurich and supported by leading VCs. We give industry workers a helping hand for tedious manual labor tasks and mitigate labor shortages with a versatile automation platform. Our automation solutions, driven by dexterous robotic hands and cutting edge AI trained on human observations, bring a new level of AI embodiment to the real world.

As an AI Research Scientist (Robot Learning) you will drive frontier AI model development and data flywheel project management for dexterous robotic manipulation. You will shape all aspects of the development of end-to-end AI models for robotics, from large scale multi-task pre-training to specialized fine-tuning and post-training. You will also be responsible for the implementation and management of the data flywheel process, supervising and organizing task specification, data collection, model training and model evaluation in the real world. As an early employee, you will immediately co-lead AI engineering and science in close contact with the founders and early team.

## Responsibilities

- Drive research and implementation for large scale, multi-task foundation AI models for robotics, quickly iterate over architecture design and parameters
- Oversee model specialization for end use cases with fine-tuning and other post-training techniques
- Drive the implementation and management of the data flywheel process, from data specification, to data collection, model training and real world evals
- Write clean, maintainable python code using deep learning frameworks
- Work closely with the Robotics and Hardware teams to ensure efficient and stable deployment on real world robots

## Requirements

- PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, Robotics or related field, or equivalent PhD-level experience in industry
- 3+ years of experience training generative models
- 4+ years of experience with developing and maintaining Python code
- Strong empirical research abilities and intuitions
- Project management / supervision experience
- Fluent English speaker

## Nice to have

- Published deep learning and/or robot learning research in leading conferences (NeurIPS, CoRL, ICML, ICLR, etc.)
- Experience in training large scale foundation models with distributed multi-GPU setups
- Robotics and ROS2 experience
- Experience with RL fine-tuning of generative models
- Experience in open source software development

## Compensation & Benefits

- We offer a total compensation package including a competitive yearly base salary and a strong stock option package to make you part of our shared success.
- You will work with the founders from day one, shaping the company and participating in its success from its early stages.
- Surprise team trips, free gym and sports subscription, joint breakfasts and dinners and other exciting team activities.

You will have the opportunity to shape a robotics & AI company from the ground up. In flat hierarchies you will work directly with the founders and some of the best talents in the robotics space. At mimic, you are accepted for who you are. As part of our ongoing journey towards creating a diverse and inclusive environment we encourage everyone to apply and we are looking forward to you bringing along your knowledge, personal experiences, and fresh perspectives. Together we can solve some of the greatest challenges in robotics.

## About Mimic Robotics

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Mimic Robotics builds general-purpose robots for factory floors, using frontier AI and video-action models to achieve dexterous, autonomous manipulation in unstructured environments.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage; $20.8M total funding)
- **Headquarters**: Zurich, Switzerland (with a research unit in San Francisco, USA)
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Benedek Forrai (Co-Founder & Lead Roboticist), Stephan-Daniel Gravert (Co-Founder & CPO), Robert Katzschmann (Co-founder & Scientific Advisor)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Robotics engineering / AI-powered industrial automation
- **Target customers**: B2B – manufacturing, logistics, and other operations that involve complex, tedious manual tasks
- **Mission**: “enable humanity to create, produce and manufacture at will, with minimum effort” [mimicrobotics.com](https://www.mimicrobotics.com/about)

## Products & Services
- **Video-Action Models**: A proprietary AI paradigm that leverages large-scale video pre-training to predict and execute robot actions, generalizing across unseen tasks and adapting to real-world variability.
- **MIMIC-ONE Hand**: A 16‑DoF tendon‑driven humanoid hand controlled by a diffusion‑based architecture, achieving up to 93.3% task success on unseen tasks.
- **LAD (Latent Action Diffusion)**: A framework that aligns action spaces across human hands, robotic hands, and grippers via contrastive learning, enabling a single policy to control multiple robot embodiments.
- **MAPLE**: A research collaboration with ETH Zurich and Microsoft Research that learns dexterous manipulation priors from large‑scale egocentric video of human hand interactions.
- **Robot Stations**: Available in one‑ or two‑arm configurations, mounted on a stationary table or an autonomous mobile platform – platform‑agnostic to fit the customer’s specific use case.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company)
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of **$20.8 million** (as of 2025, including a $16M seed round led by Speedinvest and Elaia, plus grants from Venture Kick, Innosuisse, and others) [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/mimicrobotics)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Speedinvest, Elaia, Venture Kick, Innosuisse; research partners include ETH Zurich and Microsoft Research
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount of 40 employees (~166.7% YoY growth)
  - LinkedIn following of 18,395 (+273.6% YoY)
  - Featured among Switzerland’s most exciting emerging ventures
  - Active job postings for AI, robotics, and field engineering roles

## Competitive Advantages
- **Proprietary Video-Action Models** that outperform traditional VLA (Vision-Language-Action) models by using native video pre-training with rich physics representations.
- **Cross‑embodiment learning** via LAD, allowing a single model to control different robot hands and grippers, delivering ~25% improvement in manipulation success.
- **Full‑stack approach** from AI research to hardware design (custom 16‑DoF humanoid hand) and deployment in customer facilities.
- **World‑class team** drawing talent from Google DeepMind, Tesla Optimus, ETH Zurich, MIT, and Stanford.

## Strategic Focus
- Scaling from research to real‑world customer deployments: “delivering value to our customers and their everyday operational reality.”
- Expanding the team across AI research, hardware, robotics, data operations, and business development.
- Building a “general purpose robot” that can be rapidly adapted to new use cases, driving down the cost and complexity of industrial automation.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: “Bias toward action” – solving real problems on factory floors, not just publishing papers. Tight‑knit team of ~50 people from diverse backgrounds.
- **Work environment**: In‑office roles in Zurich (HQ) and San Francisco; roles include AI Research Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer, Embedded Systems Engineer, and Field Engineer.
- **Engineering culture**: Cutting‑edge AI research combined with hands‑on hardware and systems work; collaboration with top academic labs (ETH Zurich, MIT).
- **Growth opportunity**: Join a fast‑growing startup (166% headcount increase) at the frontier of physical AI, with direct impact on product and customer success.

## Sources
1. [mimicrobotics.com – Homepage](https://www.mimicrobotics.com/)
2. [mimicrobotics.com – About](https://www.mimicrobotics.com/about)
3. [mimicrobotics.com – Careers](https://www.mimicrobotics.com/careers)
4. [jobs.gem.com – Mimic Robotics Open Positions](https://jobs.gem.com/mimicrobotics-com)
5. [linkedin.com – Mimic Robotics Company Page](https://linkedin.com/company/mimicrobotics)

## Other roles at Mimic Robotics

- [Office & Operations Coordinator](https://feeny.ai/job/office-operations-coordinator-mimic-robotics-zurich-0w2xvg09hr2y) — Zurich, Switzerland
- [Field / Site Reliability Engineering Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/field-site-reliability-engineering-intern-mimic-robotics-zurich-3gxgxjf1mwt9) — Zurich, Switzerland
- [Robotics Engineer, Model Deployment](https://feeny.ai/job/robotics-engineer-model-deployment-mimic-robotics-zurich-5ade7mb5t5k3) — Zurich, Switzerland
- [Applied AI Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/applied-ai-engineer-mimic-robotics-zurich-cyefr1f695s8) — Zurich, Switzerland
- [Embedded Systems Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/embedded-systems-engineer-mimic-robotics-zurich-kpy46j7zbqsn) — Zurich, Switzerland
- [Field Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/field-engineer-mimic-robotics-zurich-cgyajzmvrsg7) — Zurich, Switzerland
- [Data Collector / part-time job / 8 to 40 hours a week](https://feeny.ai/job/data-collector-part-time-job-8-to-40-hours-a-week-mimic-robotics-zurich-kex12q53kebp) — Zurich, Switzerland
- [Forward Deployed Robotics Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-robotics-engineer-mimic-robotics-zurich-r984djk2m5y6) — Zurich, Switzerland
- [AI Research Scientist (Robot Learning)](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-research-scientist-robot-learning-mimic-robotics-san-francisco-xsdp142mk46p) — San Francisco, CA
- [AI Research Engineer (Robot Learning)](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-research-engineer-robot-learning-mimic-robotics-san-francisco-k3p8550mppd0) — San Francisco, CA