Principal Research Scientist, Robotics
$242,500–$376,650 year
On-siteMountain View Santa Clara County, California, United States
Job Summary
Conduct state-of-the-art research on long-horizon robot autonomy, focusing on task-and-motion planning, agentic robotics, vision language models, and multimodal data fusion. Lead a team of researchers and engineers to design and implement prototypes on robotic platforms while working within cross-functional teams to evaluate concepts from inception to completion. Establish cooperative projects with universities and startups to investigate frontier technologies, generate patents, and publish findings at top-tier venues. Provide technical leadership by shaping R&D priorities through up-to-date scientific analysis and clear communication of key developments.
Required Qualifications
- PhD degree in CS/EE/Robotics, or equivalent combination of education, training, and experience
- 11+ years' post-graduate experience conducting state-of-the-art robotics R&D
- Strong research track-record including multiple first-author publications at top-tier venues in robotics or related fields, e.g., CoRL, ICRA, RAL, RSS, CVPR, ICML, NeurIPS
- Comprehensive understanding of the fundamentals of robotics, machine learning, planning, and computer vision
- Demonstrated experience implementing and testing complex integrated behaviors on simulated and real robots
- Knowledgeable of tools and processes for ML model development, tuning, evaluation, and deployment
- Familiarity with PyTorch, TensorFlow, C++, ROS, and CUDA
- Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to work independently and as part of a team
- Excellent verbal communication and writing skills to effectively represent the derived results and technical concepts developed in the course of the work
- Must be willing to travel domestically and internationally (10%)
Desired Qualifications
- Solid technical skills and rich academic and/or industry experience in the area of robot reasoning
- Passionate at pursuing technology patenting and publication
- Experience in task-and-motion planning (TAMP)
- Experience with agentic robotics
- Experience with vision language models (VLMs)
- Experience with open-world 3D perception
- Experience with world models
- Experience with locomanipulation
- Experience with multimodal (vision, tactile, audio, semantic) data fusion
- Experience leading a team of researchers and engineers to design and implement research prototypes and technology demonstrators on robotic platforms
- Experience working within cross-functional, cross-divisional teams and assisting in the design, analysis and performance evaluation from concept to completion
- Experience providing technical leadership and assisting in shaping R&D priorities by following up-to-date scientific research and communicating key developments
- Experience establishing cooperative projects with universities and startups to investigate topics that explore the frontiers of knowledge and/or deliver unique advantages in key technologies
- Experience generating patents and scientific research papers for top-tier publication venues
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