--- title: 'Member of Technical Staff - Robotics & Simulation at Moonlake' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-robotics-simulation-moonlake-san-francisco-cwvwzypd4v8s' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-06' --- # Member of Technical Staff - Robotics & Simulation at Moonlake - **Company:** Moonlake - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2025-12-22 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-06 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/moonlake/1a2382e1-5a47-4443-9417-62c87075f6e9 ## Job description Introducing Moonlake, AI for creating world simulations. ## ABOUT MOONLAKE Moonlake is building the frontier of AI-powered world simulation. We create systems that generate, simulate, and reason over rich 3D environments for robotics, embodied AI, and interactive applications. Our platform enables the creation of digital worlds, synthetic environments, and scalable simulation infrastructure used to train the next generation of intelligent systems. Our work sits at the intersection of: - Robotics - Physical AI - World Models - Simulation Infrastructure - Synthetic Data Generation - Embodied Intelligence Moonlake has raised $28M in seed funding from NVIDIA Ventures, Threshold Ventures, AIX Ventures, and notable angels including Naval Ravikant and Jeff Dean. Our mission is to build the foundational infrastructure that enables robots to learn, reason, and operate effectively in the physical world. ## THE ROLE We are looking for a Member of Technical Staff – Robotics to help build the bridge between simulation, world models, and real-world robotic systems. This role spans the full robotics stack—from evaluating foundation models and policies in simulation, to training world models, to deploying and operating physical robots. You will work closely with researchers and engineers developing next-generation simulation environments and AI systems, while ensuring those capabilities transfer successfully into real-world robotic platforms. This is a highly hands-on role combining robotics engineering, machine learning, simulation, and hardware deployment. ## WHAT YOU'LL DO ## EVALUATE ROBOT FOUNDATION MODELS & POLICIES - Benchmark and evaluate robot foundation models in simulated environments - Design evaluation frameworks for robotic reasoning, planning, manipulation, and navigation - Measure generalization, robustness, and task performance across diverse scenarios - Build infrastructure for large-scale simulation-based testing and validation ## TRAIN WORLD MODELS FOR ROBOTICS - Develop and train world models that enable robots to understand and predict environment dynamics - Build systems that learn from multimodal robot data including vision, depth, state, and actions - Improve environment understanding, forecasting, and decision-making capabilities - Work closely with simulation and AI teams to advance robotic world modeling systems ## BUILD REAL-WORLD ROBOT LEARNING PIPELINES - Collect and curate real-world robotics datasets - Train and fine-tune models using both simulated and physical robot data - Improve sim-to-real transfer for robotic policies and world models - Develop workflows connecting simulation, training infrastructure, and deployed robotic systems ## DEPLOY AND OPERATE PHYSICAL ROBOTS - Set up, integrate, and maintain robotic hardware platforms - Bring learned policies and world models onto real robotic systems - Debug hardware, software, sensing, and control issues - Develop deployment pipelines for testing, validation, and continuous improvement - Work directly with robotic manipulators, mobile robots, sensors, and compute systems ## AREAS OF FOCUS ## ROBOT FOUNDATION MODELS - Policy evaluation - Model benchmarking - Simulation-based testing - Generalization analysis - Performance measurement ## WORLD MODELS - Environment modeling - Predictive systems - Representation learning - Multimodal learning - Model-based reasoning ## SIMULATION - Robotics simulators - Digital twins - Synthetic environments - Sim-to-real transfer - Evaluation infrastructure ## ROBOTICS SYSTEMS - Robot setup and integration - Sensors and perception systems - Robot control - Hardware debugging - Deployment workflows ## WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - Strong background in robotics, embodied AI, machine learning, or related fields - Experience working with physical robotic systems - Experience with robotic simulation platforms such as Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, Habitat, Gazebo, or similar - Familiarity with robot learning, foundation models, or world models - Strong software engineering skills in Python and robotics tooling - Experience deploying software onto real robotic hardware - Ability to debug across hardware, software, and machine learning systems - Comfort working in a fast-moving research and engineering environment ## WHY THIS ROLE MATTERS Moonlake's vision extends beyond simulation. We believe the future of robotics will be powered by world models that can learn in simulation and transfer seamlessly to the physical world. This role sits at the center of that mission. You will help evaluate robotic intelligence in simulation, train the models that power robotic understanding, and deploy those systems onto real robots operating in the physical world. Your work will directly shape how future robotic systems learn, reason, and act. We are committed to being an on-site, in-person team currently based in San Francisco. ## About Moonlake ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Moonlake AI builds multimodal world models and simulation environments to accelerate the development of physical AI and embodied intelligence. - **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage) – raised $28M in Seed funding - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States - **Founded**: 2025 - **Founders**: Sharon Lee (Co-Founder); key team includes Yitong Deng (Founding Research Scientist) and Siddharth Ahuja (Head of Product) ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: AI research and world modeling, with a focus on simulation for robotics, autonomous driving, and embodied AI. - **Target customers**: B2B – enterprises in robotics, autonomous mobility, and AI research labs (e.g., OpenAI, Waymo, Stanford). - **Mission**: “Build the frontier of sim-ready worlds and embodied AI” – enabling efficient reinforcement learning and evaluation through generative simulation environments. ## Products & Services - **Moonlake World Model**: A real-time neural rendering model grounded in 3D information that creates high-fidelity simulation environments from text, images, point clouds, or Gaussian splats. Includes articulation, physics, and deformable objects. - **3D Agent**: An AI agent that operates inside Blender, automating the creation of articulated assets, physics-validated scenes, and complex environments while preserving fine-grained editability. - **Reconstruction & Agent Capabilities**: Multimodal world models that maintain state, predict outcomes, and enable planning over limited action spaces. ## Market Standing - **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not disclosed - **Key Metric**: Total funding of $28M (Seed round, November 2025) - **Notable Investors**: Threshold Ventures (formerly DFJ), AIX Ventures, NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture arm). Angel investors include Jeff Dean, Ian Goodfellow, Naval Ravikant, Steve Chen, Guillermo Rauch, and Jared Leto. - **Growth Signals**: Named to CB Insights AI 100 list (May 2026); trusted by companies with a combined market cap of $8T+ (including OpenAI, Stanford, Waymo); 4,372 LinkedIn followers (+8.2% monthly growth); small team of 15 employees with strong talent from Berkeley AI Research, Stanford, Google, and others. ## Competitive Advantages - **Real-time 3D world model** with minimal sim-to-real gap, grounded in 3D geometry rather than purely 2D video. - **Integration with Blender** allows artists and engineers to edit and refine generated assets interactively. - **Multimodal state maintenance** enables world models that can simulate complex physics and deformable objects, critical for RL training. - **Strong investor backing** from NVIDIA, top AI researchers, and unicorn founders provides strategic leverage. ## Strategic Focus - Building a **product-driven data flywheel** – starting with tools that make simulation creation accessible to everyone, then using generated data to train better world models. - Targeting **embodied general intelligence** by enabling massive-scale RL training and evaluation in generative worlds. - Expanding the **“3D Agent”** to act as a technical artist, continuously refining simulations over thousands of steps. ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: Small, high-impact research team at the frontier of world modeling and embodied AI. Team members come from top labs (Berkeley, Stanford, Google, DeepMind). - **Location**: Headquarters in San Francisco (hybrid likely, but not explicitly stated). - **Perks & Environment**: Not detailed, but the company emphasizes “building meaning” and a product-driven approach. Opportunities for deep technical work in neural rendering, physics simulation, and RL. - **Recent Recognition**: CB Insights AI 100 list adds external validation and visibility. ## Sources 1. [moonlakeai.com](https://moonlakeai.com/) 2. [linkedin.com/company/moonlake-ai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/moonlake-ai) 3. [moonlakeai.com/blog/introducing-moonlake-ai](https://moonlakeai.com/blog/introducing-moonlake-ai) 4. [moonlakeai.com/about](https://moonlakeai.com/about) 5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/Moonlake](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Moonlake) ## Other roles at Moonlake - [Head of Design](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-design-moonlake-san-francisco-zcejez0vwys1) — San Francisco, CA - [Member of Technical Staff — Agent Post-Training](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-agent-post-training-moonlake-san-francisco-gk4mq3zztbe9) — San Francisco, CA - [Head of People Operations](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-people-operations-moonlake-san-francisco-yj897grtctr3) — San Francisco, CA - [Member of Technical Staff - Simulation Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-simulation-engineer-moonlake-san-francisco-7qvzm3326680) — San Francisco, CA - [Member of Technical Staff - Product Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-product-engineer-moonlake-san-francisco-rk31eg6t9c6k) — San Francisco, CA - [Member of Technical Staff - Robotics & Simulation](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-robotics-simulation-embedding-vc-san-francisco-ksfag9kce6f6) — San Francisco, CA