VP, Robot Learning

VP, Robot Learning

Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Employment Type: Full-Time
Level: Executive / Technical Leadership
Work Arrangement: On-Site / Highly Collaborative

An early-stage robotics company is building a new generation of humanoid robotic systems designed to allow skilled workers to perform complex physical tasks remotely and safely.

The company's approach combines real-time teleoperation, haptic interfaces, physical-world data collection, and robot learning
. Rather than treating teleoperation as an end state, the platform is designed to create a continuous feedback loop: skilled operators use the robots to perform real-world work, those interactions generate rich training data, and that data becomes the foundation for increasingly capable robotic autonomy.

We are seeking a VP, Robot Learning to build and lead the company's robot learning function and define the technical roadmap from teleoperation data through learned policies and eventual autonomous operation.

This is not a research-only leadership position. The successful candidate will need to connect research with a live robotic product, make pragmatic technical decisions, and build systems that work reliably in the physical world.

• Define and own the company's end-to-end robot learning roadmap
  , from data collection and structuring through policy learning and deployment on physical robots.
• Establish the technical strategy for converting teleoperation and physical-world interactions into high-quality training data.
• Develop approaches for learning from real-world demonstrations, including contact-rich interactions, force feedback, failures, recovery behaviors, and other information that may not be captured by conventional visual datasets.
• Translate the company's broader product and autonomy vision into a practical technical roadmap.
• Determine the appropriate combination of imitation learning, reinforcement learning, perception, control, and other learning approaches needed to advance robotic capabilities.
• Establish the architecture and processes required to move from raw teleoperation data to usable training datasets and deployed policies.
• Work closely with hardware, controls, and software engineers to ensure learning systems are designed around the capabilities and limitations of the physical robot.
• Establish research and engineering priorities while balancing technical ambition with product and deployment requirements.
• Build, mentor, and eventually lead the robot learning organization as the company scales.
• Establish technical standards, development processes, and a culture of rigorous experimentation and real-world validation.
• Serve as a senior technical leader and thought partner to the executive team on the future of robotic autonomy.

• PhD or equivalent depth in robotics, computer science, machine learning, or a closely related technical field.
• Significant hands-on experience in robot learning, manipulation, embodied AI, or related robotics research and development
  .
• Demonstrated experience taking robotics learning systems beyond research environments and into physical-world applications.
• Strong understanding of areas such as:
  • Imitation learning
  • Robot learning
  • Manipulation
  • Motion and control
  • Perception
  • Reinforcement learning
  • Demonstration-based learning
• Experience working with data generated from physical robotic systems, teleoperation, human demonstrations, or other real-world interaction.
• Strong technical judgment and the ability to distinguish promising research directions from approaches that can realistically become production systems.
• Experience defining technical roadmaps and operating with substantial autonomy.
• Demonstrated ability to build or lead a technical organization, team, or major research/product function.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to work across research, software, hardware, controls, and product disciplines.
• A builder mentality and willingness to operate hands-on in an early-stage environment.

Candidates may come from advanced robotics research organizations, robotics startups, university labs, or other teams working at the…