VP of Robotics Research

About this Role

What you'll do

• Set the Physical AI research agenda. Identify the highest-leverage problems across robotics, embodied agents, learning, data, evaluation, and physical-world automation.
• Build agents that act in the physical world. Develop systems that connect foundation models and agents to robots, machines, instruments, and other physical interfaces.
• Advance general-purpose robot learning. Lead research across vision-language-action models, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, world models, and multimodal policies.
• Develop a science of physical-world data. Study which demonstrations, trajectories, sensor streams, environments, and supervision signals best improve learning and generalization.
• Build scalable data-generation systems. Develop methods for generating high-quality interaction data through human demonstration, teleoperation, autonomous rollout, simulation, and hybrid human–agent workflows.
• Advance evaluation and generalization. Build rigorous benchmarks for manipulation, spatial reasoning, planning, tool use, robustness, safety, and transfer across tasks and embodiments.
• Bridge simulation and reality. Study how simulated and real-world experience should be combined and where sim-to-real transfer breaks down.
• Advance physical-world R&D automation. Build agents that operate across scientific and engineering workflows, including simulation, experimentation, design, fabrication, and laboratory systems.
• Build research that compounds. Create reusable datasets, environments, simulators, hardware testbeds, evaluation infrastructure, and research tools.
• Build and lead the research team. Recruit and develop exceptional researchers and engineers, partner with leading labs, and publish consequential research.

What you need

• Deep Physical AI expertise. Significant experience in robotics, embodied AI, robot learning, autonomous systems, or related fields.
• Strong learning and agentic systems intuition. Deep understanding of modern robot learning, multimodal models, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, world models, planning, and control.
• Physical systems intuition. Strong understanding of sensing, calibration, control, contact, actuation, latency, uncertainty, and hardware constraints.
• Exceptional research taste. You identify problems that can meaningfully expand what AI systems can do in the physical world.
• Experimental rigor. You turn open questions into strong hypotheses, controlled experiments, meaningful baselines, and evidence-backed conclusions.
• Strong evaluation judgment. You understand generalization, distribution shift, benchmark design, hardware-specific effects, and the failure modes of physical AI evaluations.
• Systems thinking. You reason across models, agents, data, hardware, simulation, tools, and evaluation as parts of a single system.
• Technical range. You are comfortable moving between model training, agent design, simulation, evaluation infrastructure, and physical experimentation.
• Research leadership. You have experience setting direction, mentoring exceptional technical talent, and leading ambitious research programs under uncertainty.

Nice to have

• Master’s or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning, Engineering, or a related field.
• Research experience at a leading AI, robotics, or embodied intelligence organization.
• Strong publication record at venues such as CoRL, RSS, ICRA, IROS, NeurIPS, ICML, or CVPR, or equivalent high-impact technical work.
• Experience with generalist robot policies, cross-embodiment learning, robot foundation models, or large-scale imitation and reinforcement learning.
• Hands-on experience with robotic platforms and frameworks such as ROS/ROS2, Isaac Lab, MuJoCo, ManiSkill, or equivalent systems.
• Experience building robotics benchmarks, simulation environments, teleoperation systems, safety evaluations, or physical-world data engines.
• Experience building agents for engineering, scientific, manufacturing, or laboratory workflows.

Skills & Categories

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Roles