Senior Manager, Software Engineering - Robotics Manipulation
$272,000–$431,250 year
On-siteAustin, Texas, United States or Charlottesville, Virginia, United States
Job Summary
Lead the Isaac Manipulation team by recruiting, mentoring, and managing a high-performing group of robotics software engineers to deliver perception, grasping, and motion capabilities for real-world industrial applications. Shape the roadmap for grasping, motion planning, and learned manipulation policies, translating hard contact-rich problems in manufacturing and logistics into robust, shipped capabilities. Partner deeply with Product Management, NVIDIA Research, and the robot-arm ecosystem to drive strategy, bridge research to product, and ensure APIs meet real workflows. Drive architecture and execution that leverages NVIDIA GPUs, CUDA, and accelerated computing across simulation, training, and on-robot inference on Jetson and edge platforms. Represent manipulation in platform-level technical and business decisions to help shape NVIDIA's investment across the robotics stack.
Required Qualifications
- BS, MS, or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, Electrical/Mechanical Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience)
- 12+ total years of relevant industry experience building robotics or robotics-adjacent systems
- 3+ years leading, mentoring, and managing engineering teams
- Hands-on expertise with robotic arms, manipulation, and physics from grasping, motion planning (across both numerical optimization and sampling-based approaches), and control (including force/impedance and contact-rich control) to perception-guided manipulation
- Working understanding of GPU-accelerated computing and modern ML infrastructure, and how to architect robotics software to take advantage of it (CUDA, PyTorch, GPU-accelerated simulation, edge inference)
- Demonstrated ability to work directly with external partners, customers, and developer communities and to translate their needs into roadmap and shipping product
- Strong software engineering fundamentals (modern C++ and Python) and the ability to engage substantively in technical and architectural decisions with your team
Desired Qualifications
- Experience building manipulation or industrial automation products at an established robot-arm company or manipulation startup
- Strong understanding of the product landscape including use cases, the integrators, and the platforms from leading vendors
- A track record building developer-facing or low-code platforms and tooling that abstract across multiple robot-arm brands and make manipulation accessible to non-experts
- Deep experience with imitation learning, reinforcement learning, sim-to-real transfer, or manipulation foundation models, and shipping learned policies onto real hardware
- Contributions to ROS 2, ros2_control, MoveIt, or the broader robotics open-source and standards community
- Experience starting or scaling a product or team from the ground up and operating with speed in ambiguous, fast-pace problem spaces
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