Research Scientist, Robotics Research - New College Grad 2025

Details

NVIDIA's Seattle Robotics Lab (SRL) conducts fundamental and applied robotics research across the full robotics stack, including perception, planning, control, reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and simulation. SRL's work has influenced top robotics, AI, and computer vision conferences and contributed to NVIDIA products such as Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, and Isaac Manipulator. The lab collaborates across research and engineering teams on foundation models and simulation/physics engines and is targeting major robotics challenges over the next few years. The team seeks research scientists with outstanding research and engineering skills, a strong publication record, strong references, and a collaborative mindset.

Responsibilities

• Develop algorithms, models, and methods for robotic manipulation and loco-manipulation for industrial and household applications.
• Integrate methods into real-world robotic manipulation systems (collaborative robot arms, industrial robot arms, mobile manipulators, humanoids, dexterous hands).
• Contribute to multi-person research projects spanning the robotics and machine learning stack.
• Engage with the academic community through high-impact publications, conferences, workshops, and code releases.
• Collaborate with product managers and engineering teams to transfer research into NVIDIA products.
• Mentor interns (PhD interns) joining NVIDIA.

Requirements

• Completing a PhD in Robotics, Machine Learning, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience).
• Strong research track record with publications in top robotics and AI venues (RSS, CoRL, ICRA, IROS, IJRR, T-RO, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, EMNLP).
• Exceptional programming skills in Python.
• Proficiency in modern deep learning frameworks (PyTorch or JAX).
• Experience with robotics frameworks (ROS or ROS2).
• Experience with physics simulation frameworks (Isaac Sim/Lab or MuJoCo).
• Familiarity with C++, CUDA, and Warp is a plus.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and interpersonal skills, with significant team experience.
• Comfort working with simulation and real-world robotics: debugging physics simulators and renderers, setting up and maintaining robotics hardware, debugging real-world communication systems, and designing robust model training and evaluation workflows.

Research Areas of Particular Interest

• Bimanual and dexterous manipulation
• Mobile manipulation and humanoid loco-manipulation
• Multisensory perception (vision, tactile, force/torque sensing)
• Simulation, sim-to-real, and real-to-sim
• Vision-language-action (VLA) models (architecture, large-scale training, test-time reasoning)
• Industrial applications (bin-picking, kitting, assembly)

Location and Logistics

• The Seattle Robotics Lab is located near the University of Washington and will move to a new office in Fremont in 2026.
• Applications accepted at least until July 29, 2025.

Compensation & Benefits

• Base salary range: 160,000 USD - 258,750 USD (determined by location, experience, and internal pay equity).
• Eligible for equity and benefits.

Diversity & Inclusion

NVIDIA is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity across race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, and other protected characteristics.