VP of Robotics Research — Enterprise AI Solutions & Strategy

ZR Talent Group has an active remote opening for a VP of Robotics Research — Enterprise AI Solutions & Strategy ($1,200,000 - $6,000,000/year). This flexible work-from-home role pairs experienced practitioners in Robotics Software, Robotics Data, Robotics Research with leading machine learning laboratories to author high-difficulty prompts, verify factual and technical rigor, and refine multi-step reasoning outputs.

Prior experience building machine learning systems is not required—our research partners value authentic practitioner judgment, domain rigor, and clear analytical writing.

Key Responsibilities & Deliverables

• 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.
• Set the Physical AI research agenda. Identify the highest-leverage problems across robotics, embodied agents, learning, data, evaluation, and physical-world automation.
• Build agents that act in the physical world. Develop systems that connect foundation models and agents to robots, machines, instruments, and other physical interfaces.
• Advance general-purpose robot learning. Lead research across vision-language-action models, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, world models, and multimodal policies.
• Develop a science of physical-world data. Study which demonstrations, trajectories, sensor streams, environments, and supervision signals best improve learning and generalization.
• Build scalable data-generation systems. Develop methods for generating high-quality interaction data through human demonstration, teleoperation, autonomous rollout, simulation, and hybrid human–agent workflows.
• Advance evaluation and generalization. Build rigorous benchmarks for manipulation, spatial reasoning, planning, tool use, robustness, safety, and transfer across tasks and embodiments.
• Bridge simulation and reality. Study how simulated and real-world experience should be combined and where sim-to-real transfer breaks down.
• Advance physical-world R&D automation. Build agents that operate across scientific and engineering workflows, including simulation, experimentation, design, fabrication, and laboratory systems.
• Build research that compounds. Create reusable datasets, environments, simulators, hardware testbeds, evaluation infrastructure, and research tools.
• Build and lead the research team. Recruit and develop exceptional researchers and engineers, partner with leading labs, and publish consequential research.

Required Qualifications & Technical Criteria

• 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.

Preferred Experience & Bonus Attributes

• 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.
• Practical background using 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.
• Compensation & Benefits Notice
• The national pay range for this full-time position is base salary of $250,000 –$350,000. All employees are eligible for equity compensation, and employees may also receive performance-based bonuses, dependent on role and subject to company policies. ZR Talent Group provides a comprehensive benefits package, including up to 100% reimbursement for health-insurance premiums, paid time off, a 401(K) plan with a company match, and additional benefits designed to support a high-performing, remote-first workforce.

Compensation, Remote Eligibility & Schedule

• Compensation Band: $1,200,000 - $6,000,000/year
• Work Model: 100% Remote / Work From Home with flexible asynchronous scheduling
• Eligible Remote Locations: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and South Africa
• Current Openings: 1 active specialist position
• Hiring Organization: ZR Talent Group
• Core Skills & Technologies: Robotics Software, Robotics Data, Robotics Research