ROBOTICS DATA RESEARCHER – Sovrano AI (Barcelona, full time)
Find out, with evidence, what data actually makes robots better, and set the direction for what Sovrano builds.
ABOUT SOVRANO
Sovrano AI is a data and research lab in Barcelona. We bring real experts into building AI: they do the work, we capture their judgment and turn it into the data, benchmarks and evidence that frontier AI labs, robotics companies and enterprise AI teams use to train and evaluate their models. Behind it: a network of 400,000+ professionals, 100+ partner universities across Europe, 23 languages and EuroExec, our own benchmark.
ABOUT THE ROLE
Physical AI has no internet: every robot that learns useful work will learn it from data someone deliberately built, tested and proved. What data a policy needs, how to judge its quality and how to test a policy against real work are still open questions. This role leads the research that answers them. The week is about 80% research (training, evaluating, publishing) and 20% communication and coordination with clients, marketing and the data team. You report to Pau Arnal, Founding Researcher, and work directly with him and the CEO. This is a founding seat on the research team: an agenda that is genuinely yours to shape, and results that change what the company does the following week.
WHAT YOU WILL DO
- Prove the data works: train and fine-tune policies on our datasets and measure the lift. When the data is not pulling its weight, find out why.




- Build the benchmarks that tell physical AI how good a policy really is on real work.
- Train the models: pick the method each question needs and run it end to end.
- Set the direction of the data layer: which tasks, which embodiments, what quality bar.
- Shape the next dataset spec with the data team, and verify the quality of what ships.
- Explain the evidence to researchers, operations leads and clients.
- Publish: papers at top venues, open releases, blog posts, with your name on the work.
WHAT WE OFFER
Competitive salary plus equity. Full time, permanent, on-site in Barcelona. Help with relocation if you are moving here.

Requisits

- PhD (or close to finishing), or a research record that does the same job, in robotics or machine learning.
- Hands-on experience training and evaluating robot policies yourself, in simulation or on hardware. You know where robotics evaluations go wrong.
- You move fast: you run the experiment early and write up what you found, even when it is the opposite of what you hoped.
- You can explain results to a researcher, an operations lead and a client.
- AI native: you work with AI tools and coding agents daily.
- Professional English.
- Based in Barcelona or willing to relocate (on-site role).
Nice to have: publications at top venues; time with real robot hardware; experience with large robotics datasets or data pipelines at scale; a strong opinion about which robotics dataset is overrated.
To apply: CV and a link to the research work you are proudest of. No cover letter.

📌 robotics data researcher – sovrano ai (Barcelona)
🏢 Sovrano AI
📍 Barcelona