robotics director

Director of Research \& Development – Humanoid Robotics

About the Company:

My client is a well-funded robotics startup backed by a major global technology conglomerate. They design safe, affordable, and intelligent humanoid robots to assist in everyday life — robots for everyone.

They combine cutting-edge AI with world-class engineering to create robot minds capable of reasoning, planning, and acting in the real world, with applications in home assistance, security, and service robotics.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and execute the long-term R\&D roadmap for humanoid robotics
• Lead and mentor two core engineering divisions: Hardware/Mechatronics (mechanical, electrical, embedded systems, actuators) and Software/AI (controls, planning, perception, AI/ML, simulation)
• Drive technical innovation in manipulation, loco-manipulation, autonomy, and robot hardware
• Oversee development of low-level and high-level control stacks, including state estimation, whole-body control, Model Predictive Control (MPC), and Reinforcement Learning-based policies
• Coordinate cross-functional collaboration across hardware, firmware, and software/AI teams
• Define and enforce technical standards, system architecture principles, and engineering processes

Requirements

• 5\+ years of experience in advanced robotics, with strong focus on legged or humanoid systems
• At least 2 years in leadership roles managing multi-disciplinary engineering teams
• Deep technical expertise in software architecture, data infrastructure, and AI models for humanoid or legged robotic systems
• Hands-on experience with learning-based approaches (reinforcement learning, imitation learning, large behavior models / VLA) for locomotion and manipulation
• Strong experience with model-based control methods (MPC, optimal control, LQR)
• Hands-on experience with real-time systems, ROS/ROS2, or robotic middleware at system level
• End-to-end experience across the full humanoid stack (actuators, sensors, electronics, control, planning, and AI)