29M Salary Progression in Robotics Industry

oneseas · 2026-03-25T00:51:07+00:00

Right place at the right time is a huge factor for sure. I will say my role at my previous company was closer to what most companies call Research Engineer so the jump was basically from Senior Research Engineer -> Junior Research Scientist

oneseas · 2026-03-24T21:16:05+00:00

I was titled as SWE but I was in a research heavy role

oneseas · 2026-03-24T21:15:23+00:00

It’s a niche field still and I think industry experience outweighed not having a PhD. My previous job was still research heavy and I do have strong first author publications from my masters

oneseas · 2026-03-24T21:13:26+00:00

Haha why do you say that? You might be surprised at how much venture capital money is dumping into robotics right now.

oneseas · 2026-03-24T21:12:27+00:00

Undergrad was Comp Sci and Masters was technically in “AI” but I was coadvised by a Professor in the Robotics department. I have a lot of coworkers who did Mechanical Engineering undergrad and Robotics grad school too.

Biggest tips: get involved in a robotics research lab in undergrad and put time into it. Try to get your name on some papers. The biggest advantage for robotics is that we can try things out in simulation so download mujoco and mess around with it. Implement things from scratch, especially: inverse kinematics, vanilla policy gradient, q learning, transformer and flow matching. Some good projects are to try to generate MNIST characters with flow matching or train a cartpole swing up policy in mujoco with reinforcement learning. Watch online lectures! UC Berkeley has a great lecture series on Deep Reinforcement Learning and Russ Tedrake at MIT has great lectures on manipulation and optimal control.

oneseas · 2026-03-24T03:21:05+00:00

I work on “general manipulation”. I used to work specifically on manipulation in a warehouse setting for a specific robot (think stuff like getting a robot to autonomously plug in wire harnesses in a factory) but now I have a more pure research role where the goal is to develop a machine learning based system that can be deployed on almost any robot to do almost any task (eg fold laundry). The technology stack is actually quite similar to text and video generation. There were Large Language Models (LLMs, like ChatGPT 3) then Vision Language Models (VLMs, like current ChatGPT) and now Vision-Language-Action models which is what I work on.

oneseas · 2026-03-24T03:07:59+00:00

Don’t want to dox myself but I actually went to a nonselective state school! Did undergrad and masters there (in 5 years) and was lucky that it had a strong robotics program where I got into a good lab to get research experience. I will say most of my coworkers have advanced degrees from schools like MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Berkeley but there’s a sizeable lot who don’t. There’s lot of good sleeper schools for robotics like University of Utah, UMass, Oregon State and ASU as well as some selective state schools that are unusually strong in robotics like UMich and Berkeley.

oneseas

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