--- title: 'Member of Technical Staff — Robotics (Reinforcement Learning) at Sentient Machines' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-robotics-reinforcement-learning-sentient-machines-san-yarj12rsh110' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-15' --- # Member of Technical Staff — Robotics (Reinforcement Learning) at Sentient Machines - **Company:** Sentient Machines - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2025-12-10 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-15 - **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/sentient-machines/am9icG9zdDonOTfTokwonf6-dkoC-xhu ## Job description ## About the Role We are looking for an engineer who will own the full locomotion and whole-body control stack for our humanoid robot. Your work will directly shape the robot’s ability to walk, balance, and move safely and smoothly in the real world. This is a highly hands-on role. You will spend your time building training pipelines in simulation, iterating on RL and IL policies, transferring them to hardware, and debugging behavior on real robots. ## What You’ll Do Develop, train, and evaluate RL and IL policies for whole-body control and locomotion. Build and optimize training pipelines in Isaac Lab and real-time inference pipelines on robot hardware. - Drive sim-to-real transfer, including domain randomization, curriculum design, and iterative policy refinement. - Work directly with hardware to diagnose failures, tune controllers, gather datasets, and improve stability and performance. - Own experiments end-to-end: from idea → prototype → simulation → real robot deployment. - Collaborate on motion, control, perception, and high-level planning systems as we scale capabilities. Ideal Background We’re looking for someone who is both a strong RL engineer and a practical roboticist—someone who enjoys seeing their work running on a real machine, not just in a paper or a simulation. You likely have experience in: - Reinforcement Learning - Isaac Lab, Isaac Gym, MuJoCo, or similar physics simulators. - Building training pipelines with PyTorch. - Deploying policies on embedded or GPU-accelerated systems (C++/Python/JAX/etc). - Whole-body control, locomotion control, or quadruped/humanoid robotics. - Working with real robots — debugging hardware, evaluating behavior, collecting rollouts. Bonus experience (not required): - Unitree or similar humanoid/quadruped platforms. - ACT, Diffusion Policy, GR00T, or other imitation learning methods. - Motion planning, model predictive control, or low-level torque control. Who Thrives Here You're a great fit if you: - Prefer real results over academic elegance. - Love tuning, tweaking, and iterating rapidly. - Are excited to push a robot until it breaks—and then fix it. - Are comfortable owning a large scope and moving fast with incomplete information. - Get deep satisfaction from seeing something you built controlling a physical system. This role is not a fit if you primarily want to publish papers, or work in large slow-moving orgs.. What This Role Offers - Significant ownership over a foundational part of the robot’s capabilities. - The ability to ship work directly to hardware from day one. - A seat on the ground floor of an ambitious robotics team. - Fast iteration cycles, huge autonomy, and the chance to define core technical systems. ## About Sentient Machines ## Company Overview - **One‑liner**: Sentient Machines provides an AI‑driven emotional intelligence platform that analyses customer interactions in real time to improve CX, compliance and agent performance. - **Entity Type**: Private (Bootstrapped; early support from Entrepreneur First is noted as conflicting) - **Headquarters**: London, United Kingdom - **Founded**: 2016 - **Founders**: Dr Danica Damljanovic (CEO) ## Core Business - **Primary industries**: Contact centre analytics, customer experience, compliance, conversational intelligence - **Target customers**: B2B – contact centres, customer support teams, compliance departments (enterprise and mid‑market) - **Mission/purpose**: Train AI to understand complex human emotions so businesses can scale in more humane ways ## Products & Services - **Conversation Analytics+**: A multimodal AI platform that detects 500+ emotions, behaviours and events in real time across voice and text in 99 languages. Delivered as SaaS with plug‑and‑play integration (Genesys AppFoundry, telephony, CRM). Three proposition tiers: - **Financial Performance Engine** – live agent coaching to boost conversion and reduce ramp time - **Regulatory Risk Shield** – 100% interaction monitoring for compliance, vulnerable‑customer identification and complaint prevention - (Growth capabilities unlocked at higher tiers) ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: **$1.3M** (Latka, 2025; conflicting reports – company site states “Funded by Entrepreneur First”) - **Key Metric**: **$440K ARR** (2025, bootstrapped); no VC funding raised (Latka, 2025) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Entrepreneur First (early backer, per company about page – conflicting with bootstrapped status); listed on Genesys AppFoundry - **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew +33.3% YoY (3 employees in 2025; ~4 in 2026); consistent revenue growth since 2016; reduced complaint rate by 26% and escalations by 30% for clients ## Competitive Advantages - **Deep emotional intelligence**: 500+ nuanced emotions (confusion, frustration, excitement) detected across both voice and text simultaneously - **Multilingual scale**: 99 languages covered, real‑time analysis - **Speed to value**: “7 days contract to live intelligence” – plug‑and‑play, no‑code integration - **Proprietary data & algorithms**: Trained over a decade on curated emotional data from PhD‑led NLP research (founder published 50+ papers) ## Strategic Focus - Expand real‑time emotional analytics within contact centres - Drive adoption of the “Regulatory Risk Shield” proposition as compliance requirements tighten - Continue to improve agent performance coaching and complaint prevention capabilities - Maintain research‑led AI development (ongoing academic‑industry collaboration) ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: Deep‑tech AI startup with a research‑driven team; CEO is a recognised NLP/AI expert (PhD, former Siri engineer) - **Work environment**: Small team (3–4 people) – high ownership and impact; distributed across UK and Jersey; headquarters in London - **Remote/hybrid**: Not explicitly stated, but multiple UK locations suggest flexibility - **Perks**: Not publicly detailed; likely hands‑on learning in leading‑edge emotional AI ## Sources 1. [sentientmachines.tech](https://www.sentientmachines.tech/) – platform overview, propositions, 7‑day deployment, 500+ emotions, 99 languages 2. [linkedin.com](https://uk.linkedin.com/company/sentientmachines) – company page (3 employees, +33.3% YoY, HQ London, founded 2016, IT Services/IT Consulting) 3. [getlatka.com](https://getlatka.com/companies/sentientmachines.tech) – revenue $440K ARR, valuation $1.3M, bootstrapped, ~4 employees, 2025/2026 data 4. [sentientmachines.tech/about](https://sentientmachines.tech/about) – founder Danica Damljanovic (PhD, AI expert), team, “Funded by Entrepreneur First”, awards (Top European Startup 2019)