Research Scientist, Robotics Research - PhD New College Grad 2026

Details

NVIDIA's Seattle Robotics Lab (SRL) performs fundamental and applied robotics research across the full robotics stack, including perception, planning, control, reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and simulation. SRL seeks research scientists with outstanding research and engineering skills, a proven research track record, strong references, and a team-first approach. The lab's work has impacted research and NVIDIA products such as Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, and Isaac Manipulator, and SRL collaborates with other teams on foundation models (Cosmos, GR00T-N) and the Newton physics simulation engine.

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 during their PhD programs.

Requirements

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

Research areas of particular interest

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

Benefits

• Base salary range: 168,000 USD - 264,500 USD (final base determined by location, experience, and pay of peers).
• Eligibility for equity and NVIDIA benefits.

Additional information

• The Seattle Robotics Lab is currently located near the University of Washington and is moving to a new office in the Fremont neighborhood in 2026.
• Applications will be accepted at least until January 18, 2026.
• This posting is for an existing vacancy. NVIDIA uses AI tools in its recruiting processes and is an equal opportunity employer.