VP of Robotics Research

Job Title: VP of Robotics Research

Job Type: Full-time

Location: Remote

The Role:

As VP of Robotics Research at the company, you'll lead our research organization focused on advancing physical AI and robot learning. You'll define the research direction behind how frontier robotics models are trained, evaluated, and improved, building the data and evaluation infrastructure needed to accelerate progress toward general-purpose robotic intelligence.

Our robotics organization works across large-scale real-world data collection, robot teleoperation, multimodal learning, simulation, and embodied model evaluation. With our robotics research lab, we're expanding our ability to study frontier models directly on physical hardware, develop rigorous evaluation environments, and investigate the limitations of current robotic intelligence.

You'll lead a team of Robotics Researchers while remaining deeply involved in technical research, experimentation, and the development of new methodologies. This role requires someone who understands the frontier of embodied AI, has worked hands-on with robotic learning systems, and can translate open research questions into meaningful experiments and scalable research infrastructure.

What You'll Do

1. Define and lead the company's robotics research agenda across physical AI, embodied intelligence, robot learning, and multimodal foundation models.
2. Lead research into vision-language-action (VLA) models, world models, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and general-purpose robotic policies.
3. Develop novel methodologies for evaluating frontier robotics models, including out-of-the-box hardware evaluations, safety assessments, generalization, and failure analysis.
4. Design experiments across physical robots and simulation environments to investigate spatial reasoning, physical understanding, manipulation, planning, and action-conditioned prediction.
5. Advance research into robotics data representations, including egocentric video, teleoperation trajectories, proprioception, action sequences, and multimodal annotations.
6. Develop data-centric approaches to improving robot learning, identifying which data, environments, and supervision signals most meaningfully improve model performance.
7. Establish rigorous benchmarks and evaluation frameworks for measuring model capabilities, identifying failure modes, and tracking progress across model generations.
8. Build, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of Robotics Researchers, maintaining a strong culture of scientific rigor, technical depth, and rapid experimentation.
9. Collaborate directly with frontier AI labs, robotics companies, and internal engineering teams to translate emerging research challenges into experiments, datasets, and evaluation infrastructure.
10. Drive research from initial hypothesis through experimentation, validation, and deployment, contributing to publications and the broader embodied AI research community.

What We're Looking For

1. Significant hands-on research experience in robotics, embodied AI, robot learning, or closely related areas of machine learning.
2. Demonstrated experience developing, training, evaluating, or improving robotic learning systems, beyond purely theoretical research.
3. Deep technical understanding of modern robotics learning approaches, including VLA models, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, world models, or multimodal foundation models.
4. Strong understanding of robotic manipulation, perception, spatial reasoning, planning, and generalization across tasks and environments.
5. Experience designing rigorous experiments, developing benchmarks, and investigating model behavior and failure modes.
6. Practical experience working with physical robotic systems, simulation environments, or large-scale robotics datasets.
7. Strong research track record, demonstrated through publications, impactful research contributions, open-source work, or deployed robotic learning systems.
8. Experience leading research initiatives and mentoring exceptional technical talent while remaining actively involved in research.
9. Ability to identify important open research questions, develop technically sound approaches, and execute experiments with measurable outcomes.
10. Strong programming skills and familiarity with modern machine learning and robotics research infrastructure.

Preferred Qualifications

1. Master's or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or a related technical field.
2. Research experience at a leading AI or robotics research lab, with demonstrated contributions to frontier embodied AI, robot learning, or physical AI.
3. Publications at leading conferences such as CoRL, RSS, ICRA, IROS, NeurIPS, ICML, or CVPR.
4. Experience with generalist robot policies, cross-embodiment learning, robot foundation models, or large-scale imitation and reinforcement learning.
5. Hands-on experience with robot arms, mobile manipulation, humanoid systems, or other physical robotic platforms.
6. Experience with robotics frameworks and simulation environments such as ROS/ROS2, Isaac Lab, MuJoCo, ManiSkill, or similar systems.
7. Experience developing robotics benchmarks, simulation environments, safety evaluations, or data engines for large-scale robot learning.
8. Contributions to open-source robotics projects or significant research advancing embodied intelligence.

Compensation & Benefits Notice

The national pay range for this full-time position is base salary of $250,000 –$350,000. All employees are eligible for equity compensation, and employees may also receive performance-based bonuses, dependent on role and subject to company policies. The company provides a comprehensive benefits package, including up to 100% reimbursement for health-insurance premiums, paid time off, a 401(K) plan with a company match, and additional benefits designed to support a high-performing, remote-first workforce.

The company is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, or gender identity), national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation during the application process, reach out to the hiring team.

Our hiring process utilizes artificial intelligence tools to assist in candidate screening and assessment. Our AI tools are designed to complement, not replace, human decision-making.