Director of Robotics Research

Job Title: Director of Robotics Research Job Type: Full-time Location: Remote The Role: As Director of Robotics Research, you'll lead our Robotics Research team in developing the data foundations behind robot learning. You'll define how robotics data is collected, represented, evaluated, and scaled—helping build a Robotics Data Engine that enables increasingly capable robotic systems. Working alongside AI researchers and engineers, you'll drive research at the intersection of robotics, perception, learning, and large-scale data. You'll also build and mentor a team of exceptional Robotics Researchers, setting the technical vision while remaining deeply involved in research and experimentation. What You'll Do - Define and execute the research strategy for robotics data, embodied AI, and robot learning. - Lead research initiatives focused on robotics datasets, multimodal representations, perception, manipulation, and data-centric learning. - Build, mentor, and grow a team of Robotics Researchers while fostering a culture of scientific rigor, curiosity, and rapid experimentation. - Develop novel approaches for collecting robotics data through teleoperation, human demonstrations, simulation, autonomous exploration, and real-world deployments. - Design scalable robotics data pipelines by defining collection workflows, task taxonomies, annotation schemas, quality control processes, evaluation methodologies, and final data delivery formats. - Translate research and client objectives into scalable data pipeline specifications, defining data requirements, collection strategies, labeling standards, and success metrics. - Partner with research, engineering, product, and operations teams to operationalize pipeline designs and deliver production-ready robotics data solutions. - Establish scalable benchmarks and evaluation frameworks to measure and improve robot learning performance. - Stay at the forefront of robotics research by evaluating emerging literature, datasets, and techniques from leading academic labs and industry. - Drive technical excellence through clear documentation, knowledge sharing, and effective cross-functional communication. What We're Looking For - Significant experience in robotics research, embodied AI, robot learning, or robotics software engineering. - Experience leading or mentoring high-performing technical or research teams. - Deep understanding of robotics data pipelines, multimodal datasets, and data infrastructure for robot learning. - Strong expertise in robot perception, manipulation, control, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, or foundation models for robotics. - Experience designing and evaluating large-scale robotics datasets and data collection strategies. - Ability to bridge research and engineering, translating cutting-edge ideas into scalable systems. - Excellent written and verbal communication skills with experience collaborating across multidisciplinary teams. - Passion for advancing embodied intelligence through innovative research and data-driven approaches. Preferred Qualifications - Master's or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Electrical Engineering, or a related field. - Publications at leading conferences such as CoRL, RSS, ICRA, IROS, NeurIPS, ICML, or CVPR. - Experience building large-scale robotics datasets, data engines, or research infrastructure. - Hands-on experience with robotics frameworks and simulation environments such as ROS, ROS2, Isaac Lab, Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, Habitat, or ManiSkill. - Contributions to open-source robotics projects or significant research impacting embodied AI. 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. micro1 provides a c