Research Scientist, Robotics, Cloud AI

Google; Kirkland (WA); On-site; USD 174,000 - 252,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Life insurance

Disability insurance

401(k) with company match

Vacation days

Sick time

Maternity leave

Baby bonding leave

Holidays

Job summary

Google is seeking a Research Scientist to push the boundaries of robotics and AI. You will design and scale experiments across perception, planning, and control, collaborating with hardware teams to deploy solutions in real-world settings.

You will publish findings and contribute to internal projects while advancing core AI capabilities for Google Cloud AI Research. This role emphasizes bridging theory with practical robotic systems and large-scale testing.

Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science or robotics related fields, or equivalent practical experience.
• 2 years of research experience across robotics domains (navigation, locomotion, manipulation, etc.).
• Publications submissions for major conferences/journals (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CoRL, RSS, ICRA, IROS, CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, etc.).
• Experience coding in Python or C++.

Responsibilities

• Develop novel techniques for robotic grasping, manipulation, planning, navigation, and 3D spatial understanding.
• Design scalable teleoperation systems and data capture interfaces for robot learning.
• Create advanced sim-to-real frameworks for scalable policy learning.
• Architect, test, and deploy hardware-software robotic systems for real-world tasks.
• Collaborate with researchers and engineering teams to push physical AI advancements at Google.

Skills

Research

Publications

Python

C++

Education

PhD in Computer Science or robotics or equivalent experience

Tools

Python

C++

PyTorch

ROS2

OpenCV

Job description

In accordance with Washington state law, we are highlighting our comprehensive benefits package, which is available to all eligible US based employees. Benefits for this role include:

• Health, dental, vision, life, disability insurance
• Retirement Benefits: 401(k) with company match
• Paid Time Off: 20 days of vacation per year, accruing at a rate of 6.15 hours per pay period for the first five years of employment
• Sick Time: 40 hours/year (increased to 69 hours/year for Seattle) including 5 discretionary sick days per instance
• Maternity Leave (Short-Term Disability + Baby Bonding): 28-30 weeks
• Baby Bonding Leave: 18 weeks
• Holidays: 13 paid days per year

Minimum qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science or robotics related fields, or equivalent practical experience.
• 2 years of experience in research across robotics domains, such as navigation, locomotion, manipulation, data collection for robot learning, sim-to-real transfer, vision-language-action model, or world action model development.
• One of more scientific publication submission(s) for conferences, journals, or public repositories (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CoRL, RSS, ICRA, IROS, CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, etc.
• Experience coding in Python or C++.

Preferred qualifications

• 2 years of coding experience in Python or C++, as well as software frameworks such as PyTorch, JAX, ROS2, OpenCV.
• 1 year of experience owning and initiating research agendas.
• Experience building and scaling real-world robotic systems end-to-end, spanning custom data collection pipelines, model training, and physical deployment.
• Demonstrated ability to bridge theoretical algorithms with physical robotic hardware or high-fidelity simulation environments.

About the job

As an organization, Google maintains a portfolio of research projects driven by fundamental research, new product innovation, product contribution and infrastructure goals, while providing individuals and teams the freedom to emphasize specific types of work. As a Research Scientist, you'll setup large-scale tests and deploy promising ideas quickly and broadly, managing deadlines and deliverables while applying the latest theories to develop new and improved products, processes, or technologies. From creating experiments and prototyping implementations to designing new architectures, our research scientists work on real-world problems that span the breadth of computer science, such as machine (and deep) learning, data mining, natural language processing, hardware and software performance analysis, improving compilers for mobile platforms, as well as core search and much more.

As a Research Scientist, you'll also actively contribute to the wider research community by sharing and publishing your findings, with ideas inspired by internal projects as well as from collaborations with research programs at partner universities and technical institutes all over the world. The Google Cloud AI Research team addresses AI challenges motivated by Google Cloud’s mission of bringing AI to tech, healthcare, finance, retail and many other industries. We work on a range of unique problems focused on research topics that maximize scientific and real-world impact, aiming to push the state-of-the-art in AI and share findings with the broader research community. We also collaborate with product teams to bring innovations to real-world impact that benefits our customers. Individual pay is determined by factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

US: $174000 - $252000 (USD) + 15% bonus target + equity + benefits

Responsibilities

Learn more about benefits at Google.

• Develop novel techniques for robotic grasping, dexterous manipulation, planning, navigation, and 3D spatial understanding in dynamic physical environments.
• Design scalable teleoperation systems, portable data capture interfaces, and agent-assisted workflows to drive robot learning.
• Create advanced sim-to-real frameworks to enable scalable, generalized policy learning.
• Architect, test, and deploy robust hardware-software robotic systems to automate complex, high-precision physical workflows under real-world constraints.
• Partner with researchers, hardware specialists, and engineering teams to push the frontiers of physical AI across Google.

Google is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. See also Google's EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know by completing our Accommodations for Applicants form.