RL fellows, where are you working at now?

Dear RL fellows,

My Ph.D. research focus was on Reinforcement Learning (offline, online, offline-to-online, policy regularization). I was definitely not in the top-tier labs, not working on the hottest topics: Robotics and LLM. All I have learned is out of fashion right now. I know people are now using VLA and diffusion policy, etc.

I am now working in the LLM industry to do LLM-RL, which is definitely not REAL RL. Sadly, I really want to work in real RL fields (Robotics, Control Optimization, Recommendation Systems, trading, etc.).
I am so frustrated since the startup I am working in the leadership has zero domain knowledge and controls people with fear-based management, they just have networks in the industries, and have zero respect for researchers. They want to make money by developing quick and dirty applications that almost everyone could do, which makes us have no moats at all. That puts the entire company in jeopardy. Originally, I was hoping that at least I was able to publish papers in the LLM-RL field, but there is no chance to publish papers and no chance for real deep research, which could differentiate us from others.

I gotta pay a lot of bills, and I am the sole provider of the family, so I could not afford to go back to do a Post-Doc or work in Academia. Do you think doing side projects on robot arms or something related to Robotics could help me get into the industry? I know RL is a very niche area where only the best of the best could get offers into the best companies.
Any advice would be helpful and appreciated, thanks.