Senior Engineering Manager, Robotics and Humanoid Research

Job description

Job responsibilities

• Set Research Vision and Strategy
• Define and execute the robotics AI research roadmap in alignment with FieldAI’s mission and product goals.
• Identify emerging research directions, tools, and techniques across robotics, embodied AI, and machine learning.
• Establish clear technical goals, milestones, and success metrics tied to real-world robot performance.
• Lead and Grow Research Teams
• Recruit, mentor, and manage a multidisciplinary team of research scientists and engineers.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership through design reviews, experiment reviews, and close collaboration on challenging problems.
• Own performance management, professional development, and career progression within the team.
• Drive End-to-End Research and Deployment
• Lead projects from problem definition through algorithm design, simulation, on-robot testing, and field deployment.
• Ensure research outputs translate into robust, scalable, and safe systems on physical robots.
• Champion experimental rigor, including benchmarking, ablations, reproducibility, and failure analysis.
• Partner Across the Organization
• Collaborate closely with product, engineering, and operations teams to integrate research into production systems.
• Communicate technical progress, risks, and tradeoffs clearly to cross-functional stakeholders and leadership.
• Represent Field AI externally through publications, conferences, collaborations, and recruiting.
• Ensure Operational Excellence
• Build and maintain processes for experiment management, evaluation, and reproducibility.
• Manage resources, timelines, and priorities to deliver high-quality results efficiently.
• Foster a culture of technical excellence, ownership, and rapid iteration.

Job requirements

• PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience, with a strong background in applied research.
• 8+ years of experience delivering impactful research in robotics AI, machine learning, or closely related domains.
• 4+ years of leadership experience managing research and engineering teams, including hiring, mentorship, performance management, and career development.
• Proven ability to lead multiple complex projects in parallel, from early research through real-world validation.
• Direct, hands-on experience developing, testing, and deploying AI models on humanoid and/or quadruped robots.
• Experience with large-scale field robotics deployments.
• Deep expertise in one or more areas such as robotics reinforcement learning, manipulation, perception, planning, or multi-robot systems.
• Demonstrated success with sim-to-real transfer on legged or humanoid platforms.
• Experience deploying AI on embedded or edge systems in resource-constrained environments.
• Publications or impactful open-source contributions in robotics or embodied AI.