Research Scientist

Dyna Robotics builds general-purpose robots powered by a proprietary embodied AI foundation model with top-in-industry generalization and real-world performance. Already deployed with customers across multiple industries, our robots do commercial-grade work in the physical world. Our team comes from Google DeepMind, Meta, and Cruise, and we're backed by CRV, First Round, and other leading investors.

The Role

As a Research Scientist focused on Simulation, you will build the simulated worlds that power Dyna's loco-manipulation policies. Our robot is a wheeled mobile manipulator. Mobility and manipulation are tightly coupled, not two separate problems, so simulating one without the other misses what actually matters for our policies. You'll own the pipeline end-to-end: from real-to-sim reconstruction of the facility-scale environments our robots navigate, through procedural scene generation, to sim-based training data and evaluation for policies that jointly control base motion and arm manipulation.

What You'll Do

Real-to-Sim Reconstruction: Build a pipeline that reconstructs real, facility-scale environments into simulation (3D reconstruction, photorealistic re-rendering). That means full rooms and aisles our wheeled base navigates, not just tabletop scenes.

Facility-Scale Scene Generation: Procedurally generate navigable environments (layouts, obstacles, object placement) that stress-test loco-manipulation policies across the range of spaces our robots actually operate in.

Loco-Manipulation Sim-for-Data-Gen: Generate synthetic training data for policies that jointly reason about base positioning and arm manipulation (approach angles, reachability, obstacle-aware repositioning), and feed real-world failure modes back into new sim scenarios.

Loco-Manipulation Evaluation: Build simulation benchmarks that test the joint base+arm policy (VLA / imitation learning / diffusion models) as a whole, not manipulation in isolation on a fixed base.

Rendering for ML, Not Just Physics: Push photorealistic rendering quality specifically to close the sim-to-real gap for vision-based loco-manipulation. Rendering fidelity is a first-class deliverable, not an afterthought on top of physics accuracy.

Cross-Team Collaboration: Partner with the AI Research team on where simulated data and evaluation most accelerate loco-manipulation policy development, and with Data Ops on what's worth capturing in the real world vs. generating in sim.

What You'll Bring