[Hiring] VP of Robotics Research @EVB

Role Description

As VP of Robotics Research, you will define and lead our research agenda for Physical AI — intelligent systems that can understand, reason about, and act in the physical world.

Our research focuses on four connected areas:

• Physical Agents & Robotics: Building agents that perceive, reason, plan, and act through robots, machines, instruments, and other physical systems.
• Learning & Data: Studying how demonstrations, trajectories, sensor data, simulation, feedback, and autonomous experience improve physical-world intelligence.
• Evaluation & Generalization: Developing rigorous methods to measure physical reasoning, manipulation, planning, robustness, safety, and transfer across tasks and environments.
• Physical-World R&D Automation: Exploring how agents can accelerate scientific and engineering workflows through simulation, experimentation, design, fabrication, and real-world tools.

You will set research direction across these areas, stay close to models and physical systems, build a world-class research team, and partner with leading AI and robotics labs on their hardest Physical AI problems.

Qualifications

• Deep Physical AI expertise: Significant experience in robotics, embodied AI, robot learning, autonomous systems, or related fields.
• Strong learning and agentic systems intuition: Deep understanding of modern robot learning, multimodal models, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, world models, planning, and control.
• Physical systems intuition: Strong understanding of sensing, calibration, control, contact, actuation, latency, uncertainty, and hardware constraints.
• Exceptional research taste: You identify problems that can meaningfully expand what AI systems can do in the physical world.
• Experimental rigor: You turn open questions into strong hypotheses, controlled experiments, meaningful baselines, and evidence-backed conclusions.
• Strong evaluation judgment: You understand generalization, distribution shift, benchmark design, hardware-specific effects, and the failure modes of physical AI evaluations.
• Systems thinking: You reason across models, agents, data, hardware, simulation, tools, and evaluation as parts of a single system.
• Technical range: You are comfortable moving between model training, agent design, simulation, evaluation infrastructure, and physical experimentation.
• Research leadership: You have experience setting direction, mentoring exceptional technical talent, and leading ambitious research programs under uncertainty.

Requirements

• Master’s or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning, Engineering, or a related field.
• Research experience at a leading AI, robotics, or embodied intelligence organization.
• Strong publication record at venues such as CoRL, RSS, ICRA, IROS, NeurIPS, ICML, or CVPR, or equivalent high-impact technical work.
• Experience with generalist robot policies, cross-embodiment learning, robot foundation models, or large-scale imitation and reinforcement learning.
• Hands-on experience with robotic platforms and frameworks such as ROS/ROS2, Isaac Lab, MuJoCo, ManiSkill, or equivalent systems.
• Experience building robotics benchmarks, simulation environments, teleoperation systems, safety evaluations, or physical-world data engines.
• Experience building agents for engineering, scientific, manufacturing, or laboratory workflows.

Benefits

• Base salary of $250,000 – $350,000.
• Eligible for equity compensation.
• Performance-based bonuses, dependent on role and subject to company policies.
• Comprehensive benefits package, including up to 100% reimbursement for health-insurance premiums.
• Paid time off.
• 401(K) plan with a company match.
• Additional benefits designed to support a high-performing, remote-first workforce.