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Senior Robotics Research Engineer, Robotics and AI for Drug Discovery

NVIDIA· Engineer, Sys SW
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Santa Clara, CA$184k - $287.5kfull-timePosted 6mo ago

About the role

Senior robotics research engineer to develop fundamental robotics technology and build real-world systems for automation and autonomy in molecular discovery, manufacturing, testing, and validation, as part of NVIDIA's collaboration with Eli Lilly and the Seattle Robotics Lab.

Responsibilities

  • Using NVIDIA Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, and Matterix to build digital twins of robots, laboratory environments, and scientific procedures
  • Using NVIDIA Newton to simulate the physics of robots, articulated rigid bodies, deformable objects, granular media, and fluids
  • Developing perception pipelines for object detection, pose estimation, and tracking, leveraging multisensory inputs (e.g., RGB, depth, force/torque, tactile) and foundation models
  • Translate experimental protocols into executable physical procedures and smooth, collision-free trajectories by using VLMs and developing task and motion planning pipelines
  • Training robots to solve contact-rich manipulation tasks through imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and high-performance control
  • Building real-world systems that perform discovery, manufacturing, testing, and validation procedures with extremely high reliability and efficiency
  • Integrating these systems into real-world biological experiment workflows
  • Collaborating with research scientists in the Seattle Robotics Lab to elevate early-stage research findings and integrate them into a mature automation and autonomy stack
  • Collaborating with researchers and engineers in the NVIDIA + Lilly Co-innovation AI Lab across computational biology and chemistry, generative and agentic AI, bioinformatics, simulation
  • Periodically co-authoring publications on technological achievements at high-impact scientific journals and conferences

Qualifications

  • A PhD in Robotics, Machine Learning, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience)
  • At least 3 years of research and engineering experience after completing the PhD; 5+ years preferred
  • Deep knowledge of both theory and practice of robotics and AI with strong real-world robotics expertise
  • Exceptional communication, collaboration, and interpersonal skills; experience leading and contributing in teams
  • Exceptional programming skills in Python; familiarity with C++, CUDA, and Warp is a plus
  • Track record of writing clean, high-quality code with standard software engineering practices (unit tests, version control, CI/CD)
  • Fluency in modern deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch and JAX; experience training DL models on GPU clusters
  • Significant experience with robotics frameworks such as ROS2 and physics simulation frameworks like Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, MuJoCo
  • Comfort debugging physics simulators/renderers under rapid development; setting up and maintaining complex robotics hardware; debugging communication systems; robust workflows for model training and evaluation
  • Willingness to embrace rapidly-developing robotics and AI technology, and rapidly learn biology and chemistry fundamentals, laboratory tasks, and safety/regulatory constraints; direct experience in scientific and laboratory automation a plus

Skills

Required:PythonROS2PyTorchIsaac SimReinforcement LearningImitation Learning
Nice to have:C++CUDAJAXMuJoCo

Benefits

  • Equity and benefits (as per company standards)
Last updated Jul 3, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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