SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Applied Intuition is seeking a founding senior Research Scientist to lead the humanoid robotics vertical within their Research Group. This is a rare opportunity to combine research autonomy with real-world deployment at a $15B company backed by leading physical AI infrastructure.
You will set and drive the research agenda for humanoid robotics with a focus on dexterous manipulation and frontier research problems. Your work will span original research on world-action foundation models and reinforcement learning, delivering manipulation policies for humanoid robotic systems. As a founding senior researcher on the humanoid effort, you'll shape both technical direction and team growth, publishing at top-tier venues (CoRL, ICRA, RSS) while collaborating closely with Research Engineers and product teams to deploy methods into real humanoid platforms and dexterous hands.
You'll partner with senior researchers Yihan Hu and Wei on cross-cutting problems spanning autonomy and robotics, operating on a flat team structure within a Research Group composed of leading experts from top institutions. The company has eight Best Paper awards at premier conferences and a track record of deploying research into production systems across automotive, defense, and industrial verticals.
Required qualifications include 1+ years of industry research experience or a completed postdoc in a relevant field, a strong research record in robotics, manipulation, or robot learning with publications at top-tier conferences, a PhD in machine learning, computer vision, robotics, or related field, and technical maturity to operate independently as a senior IC and set direction for others. Nice-to-have experience includes humanoid robotics platforms, dexterous manipulation, VLA/WAM post-training, large-scale RL in simulation with sim-to-real transfer, imitation learning from teleoperation, and prior Tech Lead or founding-team experience.
Applied Intuition expects full-time employees to work primarily from their Sunnyvale office 5 days per week, with flexibility for occasional remote work and schedule adjustments for personal commitments.
