Director of Autonomy - Biped

What you'll do

• Own the capability roadmap, evaluations, and delivery timelines; hire, develop, and manage robot learning engineers.
• Coordinate with Controls, Simulation, Core Technology, Data, and Hardware teams on control interfaces, data strategy, sim-to-real transfer, base models, and hardware design.
• Train and debug policies on robots, curate data, and report progress through robot capabilities, evaluation results, and failure analysis.

What they ask for

• 5+ years working on robots in industry or research, with shipped artifacts including learned manipulation or locomanipulation policies deployed on real hardware.
• Experience leading 5+ engineers in applied robot learning, including hiring and people management, and delivering capabilities to deadlines.
• Recent hands-on policy training and debugging, plus ability to curate data, post-train policies, and diagnose failures.
• Experience post-training VLA-class policies via behavior cloning and/or RL; understanding of teleoperation and low-level control; familiarity with deep learning infrastructure such as PyTorch or JAX.

Nice to have

• Experience with multi-fingered dexterous hands, legged platforms, or applying RL to robotics.
• Familiarity with Physical Intelligence (π) models, NVIDIA GR00T, similar open VLA frameworks, or relevant publications and open-source contributions.

Pay

$300,000-$450,000 USD per year (base salary)

Tools

VLA, RL, PyTorch, JAX, whole-body control, inverse kinematics, NVIDIA GR00T

AI focus

Applied robot learning for bipedal locomanipulation, including post-training VLA policies through behavior cloning and/or RL, sim-to-real RL, and foundation-model development.