Physical AI R&D Scientist

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EY is scaling Physical AI capabilities in California (Palo Alto) to serve as a premier engagement hub for clients, industry leaders, startup founders, alliance partners, investors, and the broader innovation ecosystem.

We are seeking a highly organized, client-centric, and operationally driven Assistant Director to technically drive the development and validation of various Physical AI and robotics showcases for EY.ai Labs (Palo Alto).

The candidate will work closely with the Experience Lead- EY.ai Labs (Palo Alto) as well as collaborate with the Physical AI R&D team (based out of Alpharetta, Georgia), the EY Physical AI leadership, client account teams and alliance partners to build reusable accelerators and industry showcases.

The role requires a combination of deep technical expertise, hands‑on engineering capability, and the ability to communicate complex concepts to technical and executive audiences. The ideal candidate has experience developing robotic AI systems in simulation and on physical platforms and is comfortable operating in an applied R&D environment that focuses on measurable business outcome and client value.

In this role, you will be responsible for the development and advancement of Physical AI capabilities and ensuring its success at the EY.ai Labs (Palo Alto). Your key responsibilities will include:

• Design and develop intelligent robotic systems and reusable assets leveraging Vision-Language-Action models, Robot Foundation Models and related technologies.
• Build, train, fine‑tune, evaluate, and integrate the respective AI models that enable robotic perception, reasoning, planning, manipulation, navigation, and human‑machine interaction.
• Design workflows for synthetic data generation (using teleoperation, VR or other means), reinforcement learning, imitation learning, policy evaluation, and sim‑to‑real transfer.
• Evaluate new robotic foundation models, simulation technologies, and development frameworks for potential inclusion in EY’s Physical AI portfolio.
• Collaborate with EY.ai Labs (Alpharetta) R&D team, including extended technical teams as part of the lab network from other locations, to share code, datasets, models, and reusable assets.
• Serve as the key technical lead by working alongside the Experience Lead for client workshops, executive briefings and innovation sessions.
• Partner with client account teams and leaders to understand client challenges and business priorities and translate that into requirements which would help drive development roadmap.
• Contribute to technical points of view, research papers, invention disclosures, reference architectures, internal learning materials, and external technical presentations, subject to EY IP and publication processes.
• Mentor technical team members, while promoting strong engineering practices, reproducibility, responsible AI, and safe robotics development.
• Support prioritization of the EY.ai Labs (Palo Alto) R&D roadmap in alignment with global roadmap, strategy, client demand, industry relevance, and commercialization priorities.
• Develop simulation and digital‑twin environments using NVIDIA Omniverse, Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, Cosmos, or comparable platforms would be a huge plus.
• Coordinate setup, testing, and readiness of technical showcases involving Physical AI technologies or assets prior to client engagements, as well as coordinate the customization of demonstrations, showcases, presentations, and experience journeys to ensure relevance and impact for each…