As a Research Engineer, you are the technical backbone of the GAIA project’s sim-to-real pipeline — the critical link between physics-grounded simulation and real robot deployment. The project has already established a real-to-sim foundation: real environments can be reconstructed in 3D from video and images. Your focus is the next frontier: advancing sim-to-real transfer so that robot policies trained in simulation generalise robustly to real hardware. You will implement and test algorithms in Python and C++, integrate perception and control components with real Franka robotic arms, and work hand-in-hand with researchers to transform research prototypes into solid, reproducible software.

Tasks and responsibilities: 

• implementing and extending the sim-to-real transfer pipeline, building on existing real-to-sim reconstruction infrastructure to enable robust robot policy deployment on real hardware;
• developing and integrating deep learning and computer vision modules (object detection, scene understanding, pose estimation) that bridge the gap between simulated and real-world perception;
• engineering the software interface between the physics simulation environment and physical robotic platforms (Franka), including sensor integration, calibration, and real-time control loops;
• profiling and debugging the end-to-end pipeline across simulation and hardware to identify and resolve failure modes, performance bottlenecks, and domain gap issues;
• collaborating closely with postdoctoral researchers and PhD students to translate research algorithms from prototype to deployable, well-tested code;
• building and maintaining ROS2-compatible software components and contributing to the shared robotics software architecture of the Toyota–UvA platform;
• conducting systematic benchmarking of learned robot policies in simulation and on real hardware, documenting results to support joint milestone deliverables with Toyota Motor Europe and the Toyota Research Institute;
• supporting the broader research team in keeping codebase, datasets, and experimental infrastructure well-organised and reproducible across the 14-month project duration.

You are a hands-on engineer who enjoys solving hard technical problems at the boundary of software and hardware. You write clean, well-structured code, you are rigorous about testing, and nothing satisfies you more than watching a policy successfully transfer from simulation to a real robot arm. You stay composed when things break — and in robotics, things break — and you enjoy collaborating across the research–engineering boundary.

Your experience and profile:

• an MSc degree in Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, or a closely related field;
• strong programming skills in Python and C++, with a track record of writing clean, well-structured, and reproducible code;
• hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks, in particular PyTorch;
• solid understanding of computer vision concepts (object detection, pose estimation, image segmentation) and their practical implementation in real systems;
• strong problem-solving and debugging skills, with experience diagnosing issues across complex multi-component software and hardware systems;
• good communication and teamwork skills, with willingness to work at the interface of academic research and industrial engineering in a fast-paced international team;
• professional command of English (written and spoken).
• experience with ROS or ROS2 and real robotic platforms is a strong plus;
• familiarity with 3D vision, depth sensors, camera systems, or point cloud processing is a plus; experience with robot simulation environments (Drake, MuJoCo, PyBullet, Isaac Sim, or equivalent) is also welcomed.

We offer a temporary employment contract for 38 hours per week for a period of 14 months. The preferred starting date is as soon as possible.

The gross monthly salary, based on 38 hours per week and dependent on relevant experience, ranges between € 3,382 to € 4,484 (scale 8) This does not include 8% holiday allowance and 8,3% year-end allowance. The UFO profile Engineering and application manager 5 is applicable. For this position we can not sponsor a visa. The Collective Labour Agreement of Universities of the Netherlands is applicable.

Curious about our extensive secondary benefits package? You can read more about it here.