Six Figure Work

Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Agentic Systems

Boston Dynamics

Company websitebostondynamics.com (Boston Dynamics, opens in new tab)

Base salary $155K  to $235K

Employer-published annual base salary, USD. Advertised base range Waltham Office (POST)

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  • LocationWaltham Office (POST)
  • WorkplaceWorkplace not stated
  • Status at last checkSource accepting applications when checked
  • Last checked (just now) · observed since

About this job

As seen at CES 2026, Atlas is the robot that is transforming the role of humanoid robots in our world. This is your chance to come and work on the cutting edge of robotics, and make a direct impact on how people will interact with humanoids now and in the future.

The Atlas Applications team is seeking an experienced Staff Machine Learning Engineer with expertise in building agentic systems. In this pivotal role, you will work on System 2 – the planning and reasoning layer that sits above robotic control – enabling humanoid robots to perform long horizon tasks in dynamic environments.

You will work closely with behavior engineers to design and build Atlas’ agentic architecture – empowering robust autonomy through the use of task prompts, long-horizon planning, VLM inference, memory, and tool use.

Candidates who have built advanced coding agents, autonomous research agents, or multi-step reasoning systems are encouraged to apply. 

Responsibilities

  • Design and implement System 2 architectures for humanoid robot control, including planning, reasoning, memory, and tool-use frameworks.

  • Develop logging, observability and evaluation methodologies to guide performance improvement and measure reasoning quality, safety, reliability, and generalization.

  • Collaborate cross-functionally with behavior, controls, perception, and product teams to ship end-to-end capabilities. 

  • Engage with customers and internal stakeholders to understand real-world use cases and ensure solutions are practical, reliable, and impactful.

  • Stay at the forefront of agentic research and translate state-of-the-art techniques into production systems.

  • Contribute to a strong engineering culture through code reviews, testing, documentation, and thoughtful system design.

Requirements

  • 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant work on LLM-driven or agentic systems.

  • Hands-on experience building or deploying agentic architectures (e.g., coding agents, tool-using LLM systems, autonomous task agents).

  • A track record of improving agentic system performance through evaluation and benchmarking.

  • Strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, distributed systems, and software architecture.

  • Demonstrated ability to ship reliable, maintainable, and well-tested software.

  • Ability to reason about safety, failure modes, and robustness in autonomous systems.

Preferred

  • Experience working with robotics systems, vision models, and VLAs.

  • Strong proficiency in Typescript, Python and/or C++, with comfort operating across large codebases.

  • Knowledge and application of coding agents.

  • History of pushing the state of the art through research, open-source contributions, or novel production systems.

The base pay range for this position is between $155,000 to $235,000 annually. Base pay will depend on multiple individualized factors including, but not limited to internal equity, job related knowledge, skills and experience. This range represents a good faith estimate of compensation at the time of posting. Boston Dynamics offers a generous Benefits package including medical, dental vision, 401(k), paid time off and a annual bonus structure. Additional details regarding these benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer for employment. We are growing rapidly, building a commercial company that delivers cutting edge technology and solutions to our customers from industrial applications to logistics and warehouse solutions.

Source: Boston Dynamics on Workday · View original posting (opens in new tab)

Pay in context

This role's base floor ($155,000) is above 55% of the 140 Data & ML roles in Massachusetts listed on this site. Their median floor is $149,000; the middle half runs from $126,750 to $177,600.

Only jobs on this site count, and each one publishes a base salary of $100,000 or more, so this compares six-figure jobs with each other, not with the whole market. Computed Nov 6, 2026.

This range next to 6 other live Boston Dynamics roles with the nearest advertised base floor
Chart as a table
This range next to 6 other live Boston Dynamics roles with the nearest advertised base floor
RolePublished base
Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Agentic Systems (this listing)$155K - $235K
Senior Staff Systems Engineer, Embedded Safety$155K - $193K
Principal Mechanical Engineer$155K - $193K
Associate Director, R&D Quality Engineering$155K - $195K
Staff Reinforcement Learning Research Engineer$155,284 - $200,000
Staff, ML Research Scientist$154,310 - $192,887
Senior Staff Robotics Simulation Engineer - Thermal & Fluids Analysis$154K - $180K

Same $100K to $400K scale as every card. All Boston Dynamics roles · How to read the bar

Observed changes

  1. First observed on the employer's board
  2. Began meeting the published-salary criteria
Observed since
Employer-stated posting date
2026-04-27
Where this pay comes from

Location as the employer wrote it: Waltham Office (POST)

The base pay range for this position is between $155,000 to $235,000 annually. Base pay will depend on multiple individualized f

Method
Employer text, read with fixed rules and re-verified
Checked
Rule set
us-base-v2

The pay passage appears in the employer's own job text. Fixed, deterministic rules located it, and the passage below was checked against the stored copy of the posting.

What we verified

  • The pay figures come from the employer's own listing, quoted exactly above.
  • The pay is an annual base salary in US dollars with a minimum of at least $100,000.
  • The role was publicly listed on the employer's job board when last checked.

We do not verify what the employer will actually offer, whether the employer is still recruiting for the role, or anything beyond what the employer published. Full methodology.