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Robot training roles, sorted by kind of work.

Training robots covers many different jobs: steering them remotely by teleoperation, performing demonstrations for them to copy, filming tasks from a head-mounted camera, labeling 3D and LiDAR scans, and testing robots on real hardware. Pay varies hugely from one to the next. Choose the work closest to your background for its pay and its employers, or look at the employers first.

$20–$45/hr
per hour, typical
99
employers hiring now
Live pay updated 1 Nov 2026, 06:02 UTCWhere enough open roles post a rate, the band is live; elsewhere it is compiled. Updated 2026-11-01.

By kind of work

7 kinds of robot training work, busiest first.

Open any card for the full picture: the tasks, pay across the market, and each employer currently hiring for it.

Pictures are illustrations; real kit and tasks differ between employers.

AV & Drone Operators

550 open now52 employers hire for it

Operate autonomous vehicles and drones as a human in the loop: in-vehicle safety drivers and remote AV operators who monitor, intervene, and generate the edge-case data self-driving systems train on, and Part 107 drone pilots flying data-collection missions. A large, established on-ramp into embodied-AI work with test fleets hiring in specific cities.

$25–$50/hrtypical pay

Live median $30/hr. Based on 84 different posted rates, from 19 employers. 427 of these 550 openings give no hourly figure. Advertised USD hourly sample only, not a representative wage survey. Missing rates may bias the result in either direction.

Robot Fleet Operations

237 open now63 employers hire for it

Keep deployed robots running in the real world: remotely monitor and teleassist delivery and service robots when they get stuck, and work on-street as an attendant who retrieves, resets, and recharges units. Interventions may supply edge cases for further evaluation and training, and the work splits between remote-from-home monitoring and in-city on-site shifts.

$20–$40/hrtypical pay

Live median $25/hr. Based on 53 different posted rates, from 18 employers. 124 of these 237 openings give no hourly figure. Advertised USD hourly sample only, not a representative wage survey. Missing rates may bias the result in either direction.

Egocentric & Wearable Capture

134 open now38 employers hire for it

Record yourself doing everyday physical tasks from a first-person view, on smart glasses, a head-mounted phone, or a wrist camera, so robots can learn from human video at scale. Some projects accept remote contributors with specified capture hardware; eligibility depends on the project.

$6–$25/hrtypical pay

Live median $10/hr. Based on 23 different posted rates, from 6 employers. 105 of these 134 openings give no hourly figure. Advertised USD hourly sample only, not a representative wage survey. Missing rates may bias the result in either direction.

Data & Demonstration Collection

128 open now44 employers hire for it

Produce the physical demonstrations a robot learns from directly: teleoperated demos, kinesthetic teaching (guiding the robot's arms by hand), bimanual ALOHA-style rigs, and provided-hardware capture. On-site studio operators are the backbone of every humanoid data engine, and the work needs dexterity and consistency rather than a technical background.

$25–$50/hrtypical pay

Live median $30/hr. Based on 27 different posted rates, from 9 employers. 73 of these 128 openings give no hourly figure. Advertised USD hourly sample only, not a representative wage survey. Missing rates may bias the result in either direction.

Robot Teleoperation

82 open now45 employers hire for it

Remotely pilot a physical robot, through a VR headset, a leader-follower arm, a joystick, or a haptic rig, so its motions become training demonstrations, or step in to guide an autonomous robot when it stalls. This is one entry point into robot training: humanoid labs run teleoperation shifts around the clock, and gaming or VR familiarity often matters more than a degree.

$25–$40/hrtypical pay

Live median $30/hr. Based on 22 different posted rates, from 11 employers. 59 of these 82 openings give no hourly figure. Advertised USD hourly sample only, not a representative wage survey. Missing rates may bias the result in either direction.

Embodied-AI Data Annotation

17 open now19 employers hire for it

Label the data robots perceive the world through: 3D bounding boxes in LiDAR point clouds, sensor-fusion and segmentation, and action, affordance, and trajectory labels on egocentric and robot video. Still the most accessible remote entry point, but geography-priced: the same task pays a US floor and an offshore fraction of it, and the simplest labeling is compressing as auto-labeling improves.

$7–$75/hrtypical pay

Live median $30/hr. Based on 7 different posted rates, from 6 employers. 10 of these 17 openings give no hourly figure. Advertised USD hourly sample only, not a representative wage survey. Missing rates may bias the result in either direction.

Robot Task Evaluation & QA

9 open now21 employers hire for it

Run trained policies on real robots and score success or failure, review collected demos for acceptance, and red-team embodied systems for unsafe behavior. Often folded into senior-operator and data-ops titles, and the tier where domain judgment (a trade skill, a clinical or industrial background) starts to command a real premium over volume work.

See current advertised ratescompiled benchmark

Compiled across employers and experience levels

First time looking at this work? Read the beginner guides for what each kind involves and how people get started, then return here for the pay.

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The research behind this page

The figures here come from the same daily read of employers' job boards, and from sourced datasets, that our research reports publish with their method, their sources and a citation for every figure.