Researcher, Robot Intelligence

Samsungresearchamerica; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Samsung Research America’s Robot Intelligence Lab in Mountain View seeks researchers at Senior/Staff levels to advance robotics and embodied intelligence. A PhD in EECS/Robotics is preferred, with a strong publication record and expertise in ROS, PyTorch/TensorFlow, and C/C++.

You will conduct cutting-edge research in TAMP, WAMs, VLA/VLM models, 3D perception, and manipulation, while designing autonomous architectures and contributing to patents and papers.

Qualifications

• PhD in EECS/Robotics or equivalent
• 2–14+ years of robotics experience
• Publications in top robotics/ML venues (ICRA, CVPR, NeurIPS, etc.)
• Strong fundamentals in locomotion, manipulation, sensing, pose tracking, 3D mapping, SLAM, ROS, and policy architectures
• Experience with vision-language-action models and foundation models
• Proficiency with PyTorch, TensorFlow, C/C++, ROS, and CUDA
• Excellent problem-solving and communication skills

Responsibilities

• Conduct state-of-the-art robotics research in areas like TAMP, WAMs, VLA models, VLMs, 3D perception, manipulation, and multimodal data fusion
• Collaborate to explore new techniques, interfaces, and model architectures for training robotic policies with limited data
• Design autonomy architectures to translate high-level tasks into low-level commands
• Develop real-time video encoders, multi-view inputs, and enable CoT reasoning in VLMs for complex tasks
• Create 3D scene graphs and other semantic/geometric models
• Scale evaluation pipelines across robot fleets using simulation and real-world testing
• Contribute to patents and publish research results
• Collaborate across cross-functional teams and participate in design, analysis and evaluation

Skills

PhD in EECS/Robotics

Robotics experience

Publications in top venues

ROS

C++

PyTorch/TensorFlow

3D mapping/SLAM

Vision-language models

Education

PhD in EECS/Robotics

Tools

ROS

PyTorch

TensorFlow

CUDA

OpenCV

Job description

Lab Summary

The Robot Intelligence Lab at Samsung Research America is a new facility dedicated to advancing the field of robotics through cutting-edge research and development. The lab's mission is to develop advanced technologies to power intelligent robotic systems capable of manipulation, navigation, and complex reasoning for a variety of high-impact application areas. To achieve this mission, the lab collaborates closely with external entities such as universities, startups, and government labs, as well as with several Samsung Product and Advanced Research labs.

Position Summary

As the Robot Intelligence Lab grows, we will be hiring across multiple career levels including Senior, Staff and Senior Staff. The level at which a candidate is hired will reflect their experience, technical expertise and demonstrated impact.

Regardless of level we are looking to grow the team with Researchers who have solid technical skills and rich academic and/or industry experience in areas of robotics and embodied intelligence. Our ideal candidate explores novel technologies aimed towards generalizing robots to perform tasks in the real world. Samsung's unique advantage in the consumer electronics market and growing focus on AI and robotics will provide you with exciting technical challenges and a rewarding career experience. By leveraging Samsung's vast product ecosystem to deliver novel user experiences, your work will define Samsung's future in robotics and significantly impact real-world users.

Position Responsibilities

• Conduct state-of-the-art research to push boundaries of emerging fields of robotics, on topics such as task-and-motion planning (TAMP), world action models (WAMs), vision-language-action (VLA) models, vision language models (VLMs), open-world 3D perception, dexterous manipulation, real2sim2real, whole-body control, and multimodal (vision, tactile, audio, semantic) data fusion
• Work with team to explore novel techniques, device interfaces, and model architectures to train robotic policies effectively with limited available data
• Design autonomy architectures that interpret high-level task instructions and generate low-level task commands
• Enable real-time video encoders with multi-view inputs for robust scene understanding, enable VLMs to reason about general task knowledge, including tool usage, object interactions, and task feasibility assessment, and enable Chain-of-Thought (CoT) task reasoning on VLM for complex, multi-step task execution
• Develop efficient 3D scene graph representation and other 3D semantic/geometric models/solutions
• Scale robot evaluation pipelines across robot fleets with a combination of simulation and real-world testing
• Work within cross-functional, cross-divisional teams and assist in the design, analysis and performance evaluation from concept to completion
• Generate patents and scientific research papers for top-tier publications

Required Skills

• PhD degree in EECS/Robotics or equivalent combination of education, training, and experience
• 2-14+ years' experience in robotics
• Strong research track record with publications in top-tier robotics, computer vision, or ML venues (e.g., ICRA, RSS, Science Robotics, CVPR, ICCV, ICML, NeurIPS)
• Strong understanding of robotics fundamentals, including locomotion, manipulation, sensor inputs, pose tracking, 3D mapping, SLAM, ROS, and policy architectures particularly for semi-structured and unstructured environments
• Experience with foundation models, vision-language-action (VLA) models, vision language models (VLMs), and agentic architectures
• Solid understanding of computer vision techniques (e.g., object detection, segmentation, tracking) and real-time video tokenizer design and multi-view image processing
• Knowledgeable of tools and processes to monitor model performance and data quality, including model tuning experience
• Familiarity with PyTorch, TensorFlow, C, C++, Java, ROS, and CUDA
• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to work independently and as part of a team
• Excellent verbal communication and writing skills to effectively represent the derived results and technical concepts developed in the course of the work

Please note, "Base Pay Range" below is reflective of all levels and positions considered for this posting.

Our total rewards programs are designed to motivate and engage exceptional talent. The base pay range for roles at this level is listed below, but may be higher or lower in other states due to geographic differentials in the labor market. Within the base pay range, individual rates depend on a number of factors-including the role's function and location as well as the individual's knowledge, skills, experience, education and training. This is part of our comprehensive compensatio