Senior Research Scientist / Engineer: Dexterous Robot Manipulation

Holiday Robotics Inc.; Mountain View (CA); Hybrid; USD 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Free daily meals

Employer-paid health coverage

Relocation stipend

401(k) employer-sponsored retirement

Job summary

Holiday Robotics Research Inc. seeks a Senior Research Scientist/Engineer to design and validate FRIDAY's high-DoF, multimodal manipulation stack for dual-arm operation.

You'll integrate vision, tactile sensing, and joint data to control two 7-DoF arms and 20-DoF hands with real-time feedback and robust recovery. You'll push from simulation to real hardware, running experiments, refining subsystems, and delivering production-grade manipulation software for contact-rich tasks.

Qualifications

• BS, MS, or PhD in Robotics, CS, ME, EE or related field.
• 7+ years robotics experience, or 5+ years with an advanced degree.
• Strong foundations in hand–object kinematics, contact mechanics, grasp analysis, visuotactile state estimation, multimodal sensor fusion, high-DoF dexterous manipulation, and contact-rich control.
• Ability to translate research into production-grade manipulation software on real robots with multi-fingered hands.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction and own the architecture of FRIDAY's multimodal manipulation stack.
• Fuse vision, tactile feedback, and joint state to estimate pose, geometry, contact state, slip, force, and uncertainty for real-time manipulation.
• Develop grasping, reorientation, in-hand manipulation, tool use, assembly, and bimanual manipulation algorithms.
• Build tests to measure success, robustness, and failure recovery; deploy and debug on FRIDAY.
• Collaborate across hardware, perception, dynamics, control, planning, and simulation to validate algorithms.

Skills

Dexterous manipulation

Bimanual coordination

Visuotactile state estimation

Multimodal sensor fusion

Research-to-production deployment

Experimentation & debugging on real-ro

Education

BS, MS, or PhD in Robotics, CS, ME, EE or related field

Job description

Senior Research Scientist / Engineer: Dexterous Robot Manipulation

About the Role

Holiday Robotics Research Inc. is the U.S. subsidiary of Holiday Robotics, a leading humanoid robotics company based in South Korea. We build the entire robotics stack in-house—from hardware and firmware to planning, control, simulation, and end-user software—with the goal of freeing people from tedious, dangerous, and repetitive tasks.

We are looking for a Senior Research Scientist / Engineer to design, implement, tune, and validate FRIDAY's multimodal, high-DoF manipulation stack. You will develop manipulation algorithms for FRIDAY's dual-arm system, with each limb comprising a 7-DoF arm and a 20-DoF hand, and use multimodal feedback to coordinate the arms and hands as a unified system. This hands-on role involves running experiments, tuning subsystems, debugging behavior, and iterating rapidly between simulation and hardware to achieve contact-rich, dexterous robotic manipulation.

Key Areas

Dexterous manipulation Multi-fingered hands Visuotactile estimation Bimanual coordination In-hand manipulation Force control Failure recovery

What You'll Do

• Set technical direction and own the architecture of FRIDAY's multimodal, high-DoF manipulation stack, integrating sensing, estimation, planning, and control to coordinate dual-arm motion.
• Fuse head-mounted vision, tactile feedback, and joint state in a closed loop to estimate object pose, geometry, contact state, slip, force, and uncertainty, then adapt manipulation in real time.
• Develop algorithms for grasping, object reorientation, in-hand manipulation, tool use, assembly, and bimanual manipulation, incorporating force regulation and failure recovery.
• Build evaluation and regression tests to measure task success, robustness, and failure-recovery performance. Deploy and debug algorithms on FRIDAY and analyze real-world failure modes.
• Collaborate with researchers and engineers across hardware, firmware, perception, dynamics, control, planning, robot learning, and simulation to validate and refine algorithms in simulation and on the physical robot.

Required Qualifications

• BS, MS, or Ph.D. in Robotics, Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a closely related quantitative field.
• 7+ years of robotics experience, or 5+ years with an advanced degree, focused on manipulation, control, or perception for physical robotic systems.
• Strong theoretical and practical foundations across hand–object kinematics, contact mechanics, grasp analysis, visuotactile state estimation, multimodal sensor fusion, high-DoF dexterous manipulation, and contact-rich control.
• Demonstrated ability to turn research into production-quality manipulation software and deploy, tune, and debug it on real robots equipped with multi-fingered hands or other high-DoF manipulation systems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with high-DoF, multi-fingered hands; tactile sensors or force/torque sensing; visual servoing; or multimodal state estimation under occlusion and uncertainty.
• Experience with bimanual coordination, object reorientation, in-hand manipulation, tool use, and impedance control.
• Experience controlling low-gear-ratio, BLDC-based quasi-direct-drive (QDD) actuators or hydrostatic actuation systems.
• Experience with reinforcement learning, imitation learning, or generative models for multimodal manipulation.
• Compensation: $200,000–$300,000 USD base salary + competitive equity. Final compensation is based on experience and technical impact.
• Medical, dental & vision: 100% employer-paid coverage for employees and partial coverage for dependents. Medical coverage is provided through a full-network PPO plan.
• 401(k): Employer-sponsored retirement plan.
• Relocation: Stipend for out-of-state candidates.
• Meals: Free daily meals.

Holiday Robotics Research Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, age, disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.