Senior Robotics Research Engineer, Robotics and AI for Drug Discovery

Description

The company is building robotics technology that other companies can use to become robotics businesses. The Seattle Robotics Lab works across the full robotics stack, including perception, planning, control, reinforcement learning, imitation learning, simulation, world models and multimodal action models. Over the past 9 years the lab has published more than 450 scientific papers at leading robotics, AI and computer vision conferences, and some of this work has shaped robotics research and the company's simulation and robotics products.

The company and Eli Lilly have recently announced a partnership to set up a joint AI lab aimed at hard problems in drug discovery. The Seattle Robotics Lab leads robotics work for this effort, building physical AI for wet labs where scientists stay involved in the process. The goal is automation and autonomy for molecular discovery, manufacturing, testing and validation.

This is a senior role for a robotics research engineer working on fundamental robotics technology and on real-world systems for lab automation. The posting is for an existing vacancy.

Responsibilities

• Build digital twins of robots, lab environments and scientific procedures using the company Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab and Matterix.
• Simulate robot physics, including articulated rigid bodies, deformable objects, granular media and fluids, with the company Newton.
• Build perception pipelines for object detection, pose estimation and tracking that combine multisensory inputs such as RGB, depth, force/torque and tactile data with foundation models.
• Turn experimental protocols into physical procedures and smooth, collision-free trajectories using VLMs, task and motion planning pipelines.
• Train robots on contact-rich manipulation through imitation learning, reinforcement learning and high-performance control.
• Build real-world systems that run discovery, manufacturing, testing and validation procedures with very high reliability and efficiency, and integrate them into biological experiment workflows.
• Work with research scientists in the Seattle Robotics Lab to move early findings into a mature automation and autonomy stack.
• Work with research scientists and engineers in the joint the company and Lilly lab, whose fields include computational biology and chemistry, generative and agentic AI, bioinformatics and simulation.
• Co-author papers on technical results for high-impact journals and conferences from time to time.

Requirements

• 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 the PhD. 5+ years is preferred.
• Deep knowledge of robotics and AI theory and practice, especially in real-world robotics applications.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with substantial experience leading and contributing on teams.
• Expert Python programming. Familiarity with C++, CUDA and Warp is a plus.
• A record of writing clean, high-quality code with team members, using standard software practices such as unit tests, version control and CI/CD.
• Fluency in deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch and JAX, and experience training deep learning models on GPU clusters.
• Significant experience with ROS2 and physics simulators such as Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab and MuJoCo.
• Comfort with the hard parts of simulation and real hardware: debugging physics simulators and renderers that change quickly, setting up and maintaining complex robot hardware, tracking down communication problems such as latency, bandwidth and race conditions, and building sound workflows for training and evaluation.
• Willingness to try fast-moving robotics and AI methods, such as robotics foundation models, world models and agentic AI, and to learn biology, chemistry, lab tasks, lab hardware, lab automation standards, and safety and regulatory rules quickly. Direct experience in scientific or lab automation is a strong plus.
• Areas of particular interest: bimanual manipulation; mobile manipulation and humanoid loco-manipulation; simulation, sim-to-real and real-to-sim; multisensory perception (vision, force/torque, tactile); task and motion planning; grasp and manipulation planning; imitation learning and reinforcement learning; high-performance control; robotics foundation models.

Conditions

Base salary depends on location, experience and other objective job-related factors. Level 4 ranges from 184,000 USD to 287,500 USD, and Level 5 ranges from 224,000 USD to 356,500 USD.

Applications are accepted at least until November 3, 2026.

The company uses AI tools in its recruiting process.

The company is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on any legally protected basis.