Director of Robotics Research

About this role

Job Title: Director of Robotics Research As Director of Robotics Research, you'll lead our Robotics Research team in developing the data foundations behind robot learning. You'll define how robotics data is collected, represented, evaluated, and scaled—helping build a Robotics Data Engine that enables increasingly capable robotic systems. Working alongside AI researchers and engineers, you'll drive research at the intersection of robotics, perception, learning, and large-scale data. You'll also build and mentor a team of exceptional Robotics Researchers, setting the technical vision while remaining deeply involved in research and experimentation.

Skills

Key responsibilities

• Define and execute the research strategy for robotics data, embodied AI, and robot learning.
• Lead research initiatives focused on robotics datasets, multimodal representations, perception, manipulation, and data-centric learning.
• Build, mentor, and grow a team of Robotics Researchers while fostering a culture of scientific rigor, curiosity, and rapid experimentation.
• Develop novel approaches for collecting robotics data through teleoperation, human demonstrations, simulation, autonomous exploration, and real-world deployments.
• Design scalable robotics data pipelines by defining collection workflows, task taxonomies, annotation schemas, quality control processes, evaluation methodologies, and final data delivery formats.
• Translate research and client objectives into scalable data pipeline specifications, defining data requirements, collection strategies, labeling standards, and success metrics.
• Partner with research, engineering, product, and operations teams to operationalize pipeline designs and deliver production-ready robotics data solutions.
• Establish scalable benchmarks and evaluation frameworks to measure and improve robot learning performance.
• Stay at the forefront of robotics research by evaluating emerging literature, datasets, and techniques from leading academic labs and industry.
• Drive technical excellence through clear documentation, knowledge sharing, and effective cross-functional communication.

Required skills & qualifications

• Significant experience in robotics research, embodied AI, robot learning, or robotics software engineering.
• Experience leading or mentoring high-performing technical or research teams.
• Deep understanding of robotics data pipelines, multimodal datasets, and data infrastructure for robot learning.
• Strong expertise in robot perception, manipulation, control, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, or foundation models for robotics.
• Experience designing and evaluating large-scale robotics datasets and data collection strategies.
• Ability to bridge research and engineering, translating cutting-edge ideas into scalable systems.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with experience collaborating across multidisciplinary teams.
• Passion for advancing embodied intelligence through innovative research and data-driven approaches.

Preferred qualifications

• Master's or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• Publications at leading conferences such as CoRL, RSS, ICRA, IROS, NeurIPS, ICML, or CVPR.
• Experience building large-scale robotics datasets, data engines, or research infrastructure.
• Hands-on experience with robotics frameworks and simulation environments such as ROS, ROS2, Isaac Lab, Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, Habitat, or ManiSkill.
• Contributions to open-source robotics projects or significant research impacting embodied AI.