Research Development Lead

Goliath is currently partnering with a Frontier AI research laboratory in New York City as they look to build out a new Robotics Research function.

As many competing labs continue to invest heavily in Physical AI, spanning both drug discovery and robotics, our client has identified robotics as a key strategic growth area and is making a significant commitment to establishing an entire robotics pillar from the ground up. This initiative will play a central role in shaping the firm's long-term research direction and capabilities.

This role will be more hardware focused (not design, but modeling onto hardware and loading policies that control parts of the robot i.e. arms). So systems integration, data collection, sim to real.

Role:

Hardware ML Technical Lead/ Physical AI Architect.

Responsibilities

• Design and advance novel robotics learning systems that enable intelligent agents to understand, interact with and adapt to complex real-world environments.
• Collaborate with multidisciplinary research teams to translate cutting-edge AI research into scalable capabilities for embodied intelligence and autonomous systems.

Essential Requirements

• Strong track record of research or industry contributions in robotics, machine learning, computer vision or related fields.
• Experience developing and training large-scale models for perception, decision-making, planning or control.
• Deep proficiency in Python and modern machine learning frameworks, with the ability to rapidly prototype and iterate on new ideas.

Beneficial skills:

• Experience working with robotic platforms, simulation environments or real-world sensor data.
• Publications, open-source contributions or notable achievements in embodied AI, reinforcement learning, world models or related research areas.

Compensation:

Our client is able to offer very compelling base salaries of up to $425,000 with competitive equity packages to take this to $650k-1M+ Y1.

Would this interest you? If so, apply & Goliath will be in contact!