Research Scientist - Robotics

San Francisco, CA

We are a small team with a shared belief in the future of Intelligence. At Verterra, you won't just be working on Intelligence — you'll be helping define its future.

About the role

We are looking for a Robotics Research Scientist to join our team. You'll join a focused research pod building learning-based perception-to-control systems for mobile, warehouse and humanoid robots.

What you'll work on

• Invent & train embodied models. Scale transformer-based vision-language-action networks from our trillion-frame Synthetic Reality multiverse into real-world deployments.
• Close the sim-to-real loop. Design curriculum and RL-HF pipelines that adapt Aurora-series checkpoints to novel manipulators, safety-critical autonomy and long-horizon planning.
• Build sensor-fusion stacks. Integrate RGB-D, LiDAR, IMU and tactile streams into unified latent spaces that give robots 3-D situational awareness at millisecond latency.
• Prototype fast, ship faster. Push experimental branches into our fleet of test robots within days; every hour of operation feeds fresh trajectories back to the engine
• Collaborate across gears. Work with AR, Kernel and Hardware teams to co-design custom operators, compression codecs and on-device inference that run on power-constrained edge ASICs.
• Advance the field. Publish selected breakthroughs at ICRA, CoRL, RSS or NeurIPS when it grows the pie; open-source selectively to accelerate ecosystem adoption.

What we're looking for

• PhD, MSc or equivalent research record in Robotics, EE, CS or a related field focused on robot learning, control or 3-D vision.
• 5+ years hands-on building and training large-scale multimodal or policy networks on multi-node GPU clusters (PyTorch or JAX; CUDA/HIP proficiency welcome).
• First-author papers or deployed systems that pushed SOTA in manipulation, navigation or embodied simulation.
• Deep grounding in optimal control, differentiable physics, representation learning and probabilistic inference.
• Fluency in Python & modern C++; experience with ROS 2, real-time middleware, custom kernels or graph compilers is a plus.
• Bias to action, comfort with ambiguity and a collaborative drive to turn crazy ideas into shippable code—fast.

Compensation, benefits, and perks

• Annual salary: $285K - $555K
• 401(k) plan with 6% salary matching
• Generous health, dental and vision insurance for you and your dependents
• Unlimited paid time off
• Visa sponsorship and relocation stipend to bring you to SF, if possible
• A small, fast-paced, highly focused team