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AI Robot Association

Open robotics research association

Data Engineer

Full-TimeUpdated on 10/14/2026
No salary listed
Senior
Bachelor's
Tokyo, Japan
In Person
Data & AnalyticsData Engineering

About the job

Requirements
  • A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
  • At least 5 years of professional experience in data engineering or data platform development.
  • A proven record of delivering production-grade distributed data systems.
  • Experience personally designing and operating pipelines that process unstructured data such as video, images, point clouds, or sensor time-series at scale (100 TB+ total or TB+/day throughput).
  • A working understanding of storage formats such as Parquet, WebDataset, and MCAP/rosbag, or codecs such as H.264, H.265, and AV1 for this type of data.
  • At least 3 years of experience designing and operating large-scale ETL/ELT pipelines using a distributed engine such as Spark, Flink, or Ray.
  • Experience personally building and operating pipelines with orchestration tools such as Airflow or Dagster.
  • Experience collaborating with research, product, or analytics teams and designing pipelines and platforms around their goals.
  • Experience building tools, interfaces, and documentation that enable non-specialist users such as researchers and analysts to find and use data independently.
Responsibilities
  • Design and implement large-scale data pipelines covering the full lifecycle of high-quality datasets for robotics foundation models, including collection, processing, curation, and publishing.
  • Design, build, and maintain data schemas, storage solutions, and query interfaces that enable VLA researchers to efficiently discover, query, and consume curated datasets.
  • Collaborate closely with VLA researchers to capture evolving data requirements and continuously improve data pipelines through analysis and experimentation.
  • Design and scale distributed data-processing pipelines for petabyte-scale multimodal datasets, such as RGB/depth and point clouds, with complete lineage and reproducibility.
  • Define data-quality metrics and build feedback loops to continuously monitor and improve data quality.
Desired Qualifications
  • Experience analyzing and evaluating robot data, including statistical analysis and visualization of trajectories and manipulation logs, task success/failure assessment, and metrics for dataset diversity and quality.
  • Understanding of sensor characteristics (camera, depth, IMU, force/tactile), time synchronization, and calibration, and knowledge of robot-learning dataset formats such as LeRobot and Open X-Embodiment (RLDS).
  • A proven record of optimizing workloads at 10 TB+/day or petabyte scale.
  • Experience operating data-processing workloads on Kubernetes, such as EKS or GKE.
  • Experience building pipelines that feed ML training jobs, including dataloader/sharding optimization with WebDataset, Mosaic StreamingDataset, or Lance, and dataset versioning for reproducibility.
  • Experience building dataset search and discovery using full-text and vector search, such as OpenSearch, FAISS, or pgvector.
  • Experience building and operating annotation platforms such as CVAT, Label Studio, or Labelbox, designing human-in-the-loop workflows, and managing annotation quality.
  • Experience with large-scale telemetry or streaming ingestion from devices and fleets, such as Kafka, Kinesis, or MQTT.
  • Experience building lakehouses with Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, or Hudi and query engines such as Trino or Athena.
  • Business-level English proficiency is highly appreciated; Japanese proficiency is a plus.

About the company

AI Robot Association is best understood as an open research association working on foundation models for robotics. Researchers and engineers build datasets, training systems, evaluation methods, and embodied artificial-intelligence software. Its initiative brings together motion data, vision-language-action research, model development, and humanoid-robot experimentation. Roles may span machine learning, robotics, data engineering, simulation, infrastructure, research operations, and partnerships. The entity has a limited public footprint, so the profile stays close to its official research and recruiting materials.

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Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • On 2026-08-03, AIRoA released 5,000 hours of robot motion data and a foundation model.
  • On 2026-08-04, it consolidated at a 3,500 m² Heiwajima facility, signaling execution.
  • Its 2026-02-10 ICRA workshop and RSJ 2026 talks widen partner demand and visibility.

What critics are saying

  • AIRoA depends on public programs like NEDO and GENIAC, exposing it to budget cuts.
  • Open-data coordination among members can stall, while DeepMind and NVIDIA race ahead.
  • If members stop contributing data, AIRoA’s ecosystem model loses scale and relevance quickly.

What makes AI Robot Association unique

  • AIRoA launched in 2024 as Japan’s open robot-data consortium, not a single vendor.
  • It combines academia, industry, and METI-NEDO-backed projects around robot foundation models.
  • Its Heiwajima hub centralizes R&D and corporate functions across Tokyo, Miraikan, and Kyoto.

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Benefits

Remote Work Options

Training Programs

Commuter Benefits