About the roleWe are looking for a founding senior Research Scientist with a TL growth path within the Research Group at Applied Intuition. Robotics is a core vertical of our physical AI platform alongside autonomous vehicles - early stage, but with the full backing, resources, and infrastructure of a $15B company behind it. Our vision is for robotics to grow into its own vertical, and the person in this role will play a defining part in shaping that trajectory.
Humanoids and dexterous manipulation represent one of the last unsolved frontiers of physical AI, and this is where the most interesting research problems live. Unlike an academic lab constrained by professor-driven agendas, or a VC-backed startup optimizing for the next demo, this role offers something rare: real research autonomy paired with a concrete path to real-world deployment. You will help set the research agenda, work on a flat team in close collaboration with senior researchers Yihan Hu and Wei, and see your methods deployed into humanoid robots and dexterous hands through Applied's tools and infrastructure.
Our Research Group is composed of leading experts from top institutions and companies, recognized for their exceptional academic and industry contributions - including eight Best Paper awards at premier conferences and journals such as CVPR and ICRA. Learn more at appliedintuition.com/research.
We are hiring someone who has strong convictions about their technical roadmap and is looking for a place with the resources and scope to execute on them.
At Applied Intuition, you will:- Set and drive the research agenda for humanoid robotics, with a focus on dexterous manipulation and relevant frontier research problems
- Conduct original research on world-action foundation models and reinforcement learning, delivering manipulation policies for humanoid robotic systems
- Serve as a founding senior researcher on the humanoid effort, shaping both the technical direction and the growth of the team
- Publish at top-tier venues (CoRL, ICRA, RSS, and similar) alongside other Research Scientists and interns
- Collaborate closely with Research Engineers and product teams to deploy your work into real humanoid platforms and dexterous hands
- Partner with senior researchers Yihan Hu and Wei on cross-cutting problems spanning autonomy and robotics
We're looking for someone who has:- 1+ years of industry research experience, or a completed post-doc in a relevant field
- A strong research record in robotics, manipulation, robot learning, or closely related areas, with publications in top-tier conferences or journals such as CoRL, RSS, ICRA, IROS
- PhD in machine learning, computer vision, robotics, or a closely related field
- Strong technical convictions and a clear point of view on where the field is going - and the self-motivation to drive that vision to execution for a team of researchers
- Technical and professional maturity: able to operate independently as a senior IC and set direction for others
- Passion for scalable, real-world robotics and physical AI, not just benchmark performance
Nice to have:Hands-on experience in one or more of the following:
- Humanoid robotics platforms, dexterous manipulation and multi-fingered hands
- VLA/WAM and post-training for robotics
- Large-scale RL in robotic simulation, and sim-to-real transfer
- Imitation learning from teleoperation or human demonstration data
- Prior Tech Lead or founding-team experience
Don't meet every single requirement? If you're excited about this role but your past experience doesn't align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.
