What degree path actually gets you into humanoid robotics these days?

[mia_lars]

Not to derail, but this reminds me of something adjacent: Robotics engineers in the US were reportedly seeing $150k-$205k total comp at mid-level and $205k-$300k at senior level in 2026, with humanoid- and foundation-model-specialist roles clearing $280k-$475k - a meaningful premium over general robotics/automation roles. The common academic path into this field is a master's or conversion course in robotics or machine learning, followed by an internship or research role at a known lab or company - a PhD is common but increasingly not strictly required for industry roles, especially on the applied engineering side.

[noah_pate]

@mia_lars Slightly off-topic, but related: A whole-body control engineer's day-to-day work is a mix of formulating and tuning constrained optimization problems, debugging why a controller behaves differently on hardware than in simulation, and a surprising amount of time spent on numerical stability and solver performance rather than pure algorithm design. 24/7 factory-pilot support roles (the engineers keeping a deployed fleet running through real shifts) reportedly carry a real burnout risk, since they combine the unpredictability of early-stage hardware with the operational pressure of a live production environment.

[kwilliams]

This matches something I went through recently. A commonly cited skill gap in new-grad applicants is practical systems integration experience - many candidates are individually strong in ML or in mechanical design, but comparatively few have hands-on experience getting perception, planning, and control to work together reliably on real hardware under time pressure.

[deborah59]

@kwilliams Not sure I fully agree here. A field-deployment or reliability engineer's day-to-day work leans much more toward diagnosing real-world failure patterns, managing spare-parts logistics, and working directly with the customer site than toward algorithm development - a genuinely different role than a lot of new grads expect going in. In the UK, base salaries for robotics roles reportedly range from around £50,000 for new graduates up to roughly £200,000 for senior whole-body-control or reinforcement-learning specialists - a notably wide band reflecting how specialized the top end of the field has become. This whole thread is a good reminder how young this field still is. Anyway, good thread - following for more.