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Re: How do you evaluate a company's actual runway before joining as an early employee?
Posted: Mon Dec 01, 2025 6:48 am
by ssantos
@kim37 Thanks for laying this out, genuinely useful.
A strong, well-documented personal project (even a modest DIY build or a solid simulation-based RL project) reportedly carries real weight in hiring for this field, partly because the field is young enough that a demonstrated hands-on track record can meaningfully substitute for a less-relevant formal credential. How much ML background a controls role actually requires varies a lot by company and team - some whole-body control positions remain heavily classical-optimization-focused, while others increasingly expect familiarity with reinforcement learning or imitation learning even for what used to be a purely classical-controls job.
Re: How do you evaluate a company's actual runway before joining as an early employee?
Posted: Fri Dec 05, 2025 10:33 pm
by erik_novi
I see it a little differently.
Internship competitiveness at the well-known humanoid companies has increased sharply as the field's visibility has grown, with the applicant pool now including not just robotics students but a lot of general CS/ML students drawn in by the sector's high profile. Companies like Figure, 1X, Apptronik, and Agility Robotics are reportedly pulling senior ROS, controls, and learning engineers directly out of warehouse-automation and industrial-robotics roles - a sign of real talent competition between adjacent industries, not just fresh grads entering the field.
Re: How do you evaluate a company's actual runway before joining as an early employee?
Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2025 1:36 am
by arjunsanchez
Just to be precise about one thing:
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.