[Hiring] VP of Robotics Research @24-MAG

Role 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.

Key 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

Qualifications

• 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

Requirements

• Full-time engagement
• Fully remote
• Compensation: $1,500,000–$4,000,000/year
• Work will involve robotics research leadership, embodied AI, robot learning, multimodal data, perception, manipulation, evaluation frameworks, and research-team development
• Strong technical leadership combined with hands-on robotics research experience is central to the role
• Project priorities, datasets, and technical approaches may evolve as research requirements develop
• Work must be completed without using confidential, proprietary, unpublished, client-sensitive, or otherwise restricted information belonging to any employer, research laboratory, university, robotics company, client, collaborator, or other third party