Remote | VP of Robotics Research — $1,500,000–$4,000,000/year at 24-MAG in New York, New York, United States

Job description

• We are sharing a full-time leadership opportunity for an experienced robotics research executive with deep expertise in robot learning, embodied AI, robotics software, multimodal data, perception, manipulation, and large-scale robotics data systems.
• The successful candidate will define the research strategy behind robotics data and robot learning, build and mentor a high-performing research team, and work across research, engineering, product, and operations to develop scalable robotics data systems and evaluation frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Robotics Research Strategy
• Define and execute research strategy across robotics data, embodied AI, and robot learning
• Set priorities across perception, manipulation, control, and data-centric learning
• Translate emerging research into scalable technical programmes
• Maintain a clear technical vision while remaining involved in experimentation
• Robotics Data & Learning Systems
• Define how robotics data is collected, represented, validated, and delivered
• Design multimodal datasets covering perception, actions, trajectories, and environment state
• Develop scalable collection strategies using teleoperation, demonstrations, simulation, autonomous exploration, and real-world deployments
• Establish task taxonomies, annotation schemas, and quality-control processes
• Perception, Manipulation & Control
• Lead research involving robot perception and manipulation
• Evaluate imitation learning, reinforcement learning, control, and foundation-model approaches
• Analyse performance limitations and sources of failure
• Connect research findings with scalable engineering implementations
• Benchmarks & Evaluation
• Establish benchmarks for robot-learning performance
• Define metrics and success criteria across robotics tasks
• Compare models, policies, datasets, and collection approaches
• Use evaluation findings to guide research priorities
• Research Team Leadership
• Build, mentor, and grow a high-performing Robotics Research team
• Foster scientific rigour, curiosity, and rapid experimentation
• Balance long-term research priorities with practical delivery requirements
• Promote strong technical documentation and knowledge sharing
• Cross-Functional Execution
• Partner with AI researchers, robotics engineers, product, and operations teams
• Translate research and client objectives into clear data-pipeline specifications
• Operationalise research into production-ready robotics data solutions
• Communicate technical trade-offs and requirements clearly across teams

Requirements

• Significant experience in robotics research, embodied AI, robot learning, or robotics software engineering
• Proven experience leading or mentoring technical or research teams
• Deep understanding of robotics data pipelines and multimodal datasets
• Strong expertise in perception, manipulation, control, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, or robotics foundation models
• Experience designing and evaluating large-scale robotics datasets
• Ability to translate research into scalable systems
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Master's or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, or a related field is highly valued
• Publications at CoRL, RSS, ICRA, IROS, NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, or comparable venues are advantageous
• Experience with ROS/ROS2, Isaac Lab, Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, Habitat, ManiSkill, or similar environments is valuable
• Open-source robotics contributions or significant embodied-AI research are advantageous

Skills

Required

• Robotics research
• Embodied AI
• Robot learning
• Robotics software engineering
• Robotics data pipelines
• Multimodal datasets
• Perception
• Manipulation
• Control
• Imitation learning
• Reinforcement learning
• Robotics foundation models

Preferred

• ROS/ROS2
• Isaac Lab
• Isaac Sim
• MuJoCo
• Habitat
• ManiSkill
• Open-source robotics contributions