Remote | VP of Robotics Research — $1,500,000–$4,000,000/year

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

Ideal Profile

• 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

Engagement Details

• 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

About the Platform

This opportunity is available through 24-MAG LLC. We connect experienced professionals with remote consulting opportunities across technical, evaluation, and project-based workstreams.

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