Maneva is pioneering the development of AI systems for manufacturing operations, leveraging vision and production data to reduce downtime, enhance quality, and improve worker safety through actionable automation on the factory floor. As a contractor ML Engineer / Research Engineer, you will play a key role in advancing our research and engineering efforts, collaborating closely with a lead researcher and interfacing with robotics engineers to deliver impactful solutions for industrial automation. Key responsibilities include: Collaborate with a lead researcher on modeling decisions, structured experiments, and paper development Implement and maintain policy training code for methods such as ACT, Diffusion Policy, Pi0 fine‑tuning/OpenPi, and relevant baselines Independently read and implement new methods from recent papers Run ablation sweeps, generate comparison tables/plots, and analyze experimental results Maintain an evaluation harness to ensure reproducibility across runs Conduct literature sweeps and organize related‑work documentation Draft and iterate on methods, experiments, and related‑work sections for technical writing Review training code from robotics engineers as needed Required Qualifications: MS, PhD in Machine Learning, Robotics, Computer Science, or a closely related field 2–5 years of industry experience as an ML engineer At least one first‑ or co‑author paper published at a credible ML or robotics venue (e.g., CoRL, RSS, ICRA, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR) Strong proficiency with PyTorch and distributed training for ML models Hands‑on experience with imitation learning, reinforcement learning, or vision‑language‑action (VLA) methods for sequential decision‑making Proficiency with Docker for reproducible ML and research workflows Ability to design and structure ablation studies for ML experiments Ability to read recent ML/robotics papers and implement methods independently Preferred Qualifications: Experience fine‑tuning vision‑language‑action (VLA) models Robotics manipulation background Contributions to OpenPi or LeRobot projects Familiarity with advanced ML research workflows Experience collaborating with cross‑disciplinary teams in industrial automation #J-18808-Ljbffr