Research Scientist, Applied Intuition
Humanoid Robotics
$250-423k
5 days a week in office (Sunnyvale, CA)
Physical AI bringing intelligence to moving machines
Open for applications
Physical AI bringing intelligence to moving machines
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$250-423k
5 days a week in office (Sunnyvale, CA)
1001+ employees
Company mission
To build physical AI that create a safer, more prosperous world.
Role
Who you are
- 1+ years of industry research experience, or a completed post-doc in a relevant field
- A strong research record in robotics, manipulation, robot learning, or closely related areas, with publications in top-tier conferences or journals such as CoRL, RSS, ICRA, IROS
- PhD in machine learning, computer vision, robotics, or a closely related field
- Strong technical convictions and a clear point of view on where the field is going — and the self-motivation to drive that vision to execution for a team of researchers
- Technical and professional maturity: able to operate independently as a senior IC and set direction for others
- Passion for scalable, real-world robotics and physical AI, not just benchmark performance
- Don’t meet every single requirement? If you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway
Desirable
- Humanoid robotics platforms, dexterous manipulation and multi-fingered hands
- VLA/WAM and post-training for robotics
- Large-scale RL in robotic simulation, and sim-to-real transfer
- Imitation learning from teleoperation or human demonstration data
- Prior Tech Lead or founding-team experience
What the job involves
- We are looking for a founding senior Research Scientist with a TL growth path within the Research Group at Applied Intuition. Robotics is a core vertical of our physical AI platform alongside autonomous vehicles — early stage, but with the full backing, resources, and infrastructure of a $15B company behind it. Our vision is for robotics to grow into its own vertical, and the person in this role will play a defining part in shaping that trajectory
- Set and drive the research agenda for humanoid robotics, with a focus on dexterous manipulation and relevant frontier research problems
- Conduct original research on world-action foundation models and reinforcement learning, delivering manipulation policies for humanoid robotic systems
- Serve as a founding senior researcher on the humanoid effort, shaping both the technical direction and the growth of the team
- Publish at top-tier venues (CoRL, ICRA, RSS, and similar) alongside other Research Scientists and interns
- Collaborate closely with Research Engineers and product teams to deploy your work into real humanoid platforms and dexterous hands
- Partner with senior researchers Yihan Hu and Wei on cross-cutting problems spanning autonomy and robotics
Our take
Autonomous vehicles present a lot of challenging problems to engineers, particularly in terms of safety and reliability, and testing and development can be infamously slow. Applied Intuition provides software to run simulations and tests for autonomous vehicles more quickly and effectively, speeding up the development and launch of AVs for multiple industries.
With big companies such as Tesla and Google focused on developing automation, Applied Intuition has the scope to provide the software that makes it a reality. The company’s suite of simulation, validation, and drive log management software aids in the more efficient deployment of autonomous vehicles, with companies such as Toyota, Honda, Nissan, and General Motors relying on its solutions.
As the autonomous vehicles market accelerates, Applied Intuition is well set for growth, especially as it continues to expand its capabilities. Notable developments include the acquisitions of CarSim, Scenebox and Embark Trucks, as well as partnerships with AMBA and Valeo. All these efforts seek to bolster the company's offering towards supporting the faster and safer deployment of AVs. A $600 million Series F round, awarded in 2025, will go towards its next phase of product development, alongside key hires across its product team.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
68% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Jun 2025
$600m
SERIES F
Mar 2024
$250m
SERIES E
Total funding: $1.2bn
Company HQ
Sunnyvale West, Sunnyvale, CA
Leadership
Peter Ludwig
(Co-Founder & CTO)Prior to co-founding Applied Intuition in 2017, Peter was a Product Manager at Google for 5 years.
Qasar Younis
(Co-Founder & CEO)Qasar previously founded TalkBin where they served as the CEO. They also served as the COO at Y Combinator and as a Group Product Manager of Google Maps at Google.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 170 more jobs at Applied Intuition