--- title: 'Machine Learning / Computer Vision Engineer at Eka' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-computer-vision-engineer-eka-boston-f2z8zq36n5vv' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-08' --- # Machine Learning / Computer Vision Engineer at Eka - **Company:** Eka - **Location:** Boston, MA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2025-04-18 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/ekarobotics/85a22260-a520-4640-b846-98e179317f10 ## Job description Eka Robotics Eka Robotics is on a mission to build intelligence for the physical world - robots that are fast, general, and reliable. Our approach, grounded in physics, unlocks superhuman capabilities. We are defining the frontier of robotics research and deployment. Our team consists of pioneers in robotics and machine learning. We are now hiring to scale our R&D effort. We are looking for hands-on individuals who are excited to help shape the future of robotics. ## Responsibilities - Build computer vision and visual representation learning pipelines for robotic manipulation, including RGB, RGB-D, depth, segmentation, pose, keypoint, and object-centric representations. - Develop visual models that support reinforcement learning and imitation learning policies, including end-to-end visuomotor policies that map visual observations to robot actions. - Improve our data pipeline for vision-based manipulation policies through domain randomization, photorealistic rendering, synthetic data generation, sensor noise modeling, and real-world fine-tuning. - Design and train perception models that are robust to lighting changes, camera viewpoint shifts, texture variation, clutter, occlusion, object instance variation, and imperfect calibration. - Evaluate learned visual representations and policies on real robotic manipulation tasks, identify failure modes, and iterate on models, data, and training procedures. - Collaborate with robotics, robot learning, and simulation engineers to define the perception strategy for robotic manipulation. - Set up, calibrate, and evaluate camera and depth sensing systems when needed, with an emphasis on how sensor choices affect learned policies and real-world robustness. ## Minimum Qualifications - Ph.D. in computer vision or 3+ years of experience working on a computer vision product. - Strong background in machine learning for computer vision, especially deep learning-based visual perception. - Experience training modern computer vision models in Jax, PyTorch or similar frameworks. - Practical experience with visual representation learning, object detection, segmentation, pose estimation, depth estimation, tracking, or 3D perception. - Strong Python programming skills - Ability to move fluidly between research code and production-quality systems. - Strong understanding of how data distribution, sensor noise, calibration, lighting, and scene variation affect model performance. ## Preferred Qualifications - Experience training policies from visual observations, including RGB, RGB-D, point clouds, object-centric representations, or learned latent representations. - Experience with domain randomization, synthetic data generation, differentiable rendering, neural rendering, or photorealistic simulation. - Experience with robotics simulators or synthetic data tools such as Isaac Sim, MuJoCo or similar environments. - Familiarity with robot learning methods such as reinforcement learning, behavior cloning, diffusion policies, offline RL, or learning from demonstrations. - Experience with real robot deployment, including camera calibration, hand-eye calibration, depth sensors, ROS/ROS2, or robot data collection pipelines. - First-author publications in top computer vision, robotics, or machine learning venues such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, RSS, CoRL, ICRA, or IROS. ## About Eka ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Eka Robotics is building general-purpose, dexterous robots that master physics through self-supervised learning and a novel Vision-Force-Action (VFA) model, aiming to deploy safe, collaborative intelligence into the physical world. - **Entity Type**: Private (Startup, Pre-Seed / Angel-backed) - **Headquarters**: Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States - **Founded**: 2025 - **Founders**: Pulkit Agrawal and Tuomas Haarnoja ## Core Business - **Primary industry/industries**: Robotics Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Hardware, Automation - **Target customers**: B2B, Enterprise (logistics, manufacturing, material handling) - **Mission or purpose statement**: To build intelligence for the physical world in its native language: force, creating robots that master physics, collaborate safely with humans, and generalize across objects, tasks, and environments. ## Products & Services - **Vision-Force-Action (VFA) Model**: A new AI foundation model that unites generality, performance, and safety. It allows robots to perceive the world visually, interact with it through force (the "native language" of physics), and execute actions. This model is designed to overcome the traditional trade-off between generality and performance in robotics. - **Dexterous Robotic Manipulation Platform**: A hardware and software platform for dexterous, collaborative robots. The platform is designed to be safe around humans, environment-agnostic, and capable of mastering the unexpected through a single model that generalizes across objects, tasks, and environments. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available (Pre-Seed / Angel-backed startup). - **Key Metric**: Total Funding: Not publicly available (described as "angel-backed" with no known external funding rounds disclosed). - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Angel-backed; specific investors not publicly disclosed. The founding team has deep ties to MIT, Berkeley, Harvard, DeepMind, Microsoft, and Boston Dynamics. - **Growth Signals**: Extremely early stage (founded in 2025). Despite this, the company has a very high growth trajectory in terms of hiring and web presence. LinkedIn reports 6 employees with +300% monthly growth, and 11 active job postings. Website traffic is growing +254.5% monthly. ## Competitive Advantages - **Founding Team & Research Pedigree**: Co-founded by Pulkit Agrawal (MIT professor, leader of the Improbable AI Lab, 2024 IEEE Early Academic Career Award) and Tuomas Haarnoja (ex-DeepMind). The team includes talent from MIT, Berkeley, Harvard, CMU, DeepMind, Microsoft, and Boston Dynamics. - **Novel Technical Approach (VFA Model)**: Their core technology, the Vision-Force-Action (VFA) model, is a claimed breakthrough that unites generality (a single model for many tasks), performance (speed and reliability), and safety (force-based interaction). This is a significant differentiator in the robotics space, which often forces a trade-off between these three attributes. - **Self-Supervised Learning & Sim-to-Real**: The company pioneers self-supervised learning and sim-to-real reinforcement learning, enabling robots to develop "common sense" and physical intuition automatically without massive amounts of human-labeled data. - **World-Class Talent Magnet**: Despite being a very early-stage startup, they are attracting top-tier talent from leading tech companies and research labs, indicating a strong technical vision and culture. ## Strategic Focus - **Productization & Deployment**: The company is actively hiring for roles across engineering, hardware, and operations, signaling a strong push to move from research to a deployable product. - **Scaling the Team**: With 11 open positions for a company of ~6 employees, the immediate strategic focus is on aggressive team building across all functions (ML, hardware, software, operations). - **Building the Foundation**: Current priorities include developing the core VFA model, building the physical robotic platform, creating robust simulation environments, and establishing operational processes for scaling. ## Why Work Here - **Cutting-Edge Mission**: Work on the frontier of embodied AI and robotics, tackling the fundamental challenge of building machines that can interact with the physical world. - **World-Class Team**: Join a team of experts from top-tier institutions (MIT, Berkeley, DeepMind, Boston Dynamics) and work alongside leaders in the field. - **High Impact, Early Stage**: As one of the first ~20 employees, you will have an outsized impact on the company's technology, culture, and direction. - **In-Office Culture**: All roles are based in Boston, MA, and are in-office, fostering close collaboration on complex hardware and software problems. - **Diverse, High-Caliber Roles**: Openings span from ML/RL engineering and simulation to mechanical design, embedded systems, and business operations, offering a wide range of challenging work. ## Sources 1. [ekarobotics.com](https://ekarobotics.com/) 2. [LinkedIn - Eka Robotics](https://www.linkedin.com/company/eka-robotics) 3. [Dealroom.co - Eka Robotics](https://app.dealroom.co/companies/eka_robotics) 4. [Built In - Eka Robotics Jobs](https://builtin.com/company/eka-robotics/jobs) 5. [Ashby - Eka Robotics Careers](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/ekarobotics) ## Other roles at Eka - [Senior/Staff/Principal Electrical Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-principal-electrical-engineer-eka-boston-e8z4fpzq6xdp) — Boston, MA - [Robotics Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/robotics-software-engineer-eka-boston-5fb4fftf57eg) — Boston, MA - [Research Engineer – Simulation](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-simulation-eka-boston-jtmvybfdvqmn) — Boston, MA - [Senior/Staff/Principal Mechanical Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-principal-mechanical-engineer-eka-boston-gm2bz9qr8geb) — Boston, MA - [Machine Learning / Reinforcement Learning Infrastructure Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-reinforcement-learning-infrastructure-engineer-eka-boston-czmmjx0d7nk3) — Boston, MA - [Machine Learning / Reinforcement Learning Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-reinforcement-learning-engineer-eka-boston-as8ph30n88pz) — Boston, MA