Research Scientist, Safe Humanoid Robots

DeepMind • New York City, NY

18d • $141,000 - $202,000

About The Position

Snapshot Artificial Intelligence could be one of humanity’s most useful inventions. At Google DeepMind, we’re a team of scientists, engineers, machine learning experts and more, working together to advance the state of the art in artificial intelligence. We use our technologies for widespread public benefit and scientific discovery, and collaborate with others on critical challenges, ensuring safety and ethics are the highest priority. About Us We are looking for Research Scientists to join the Robotics team whose mission is to “Build embodied AI responsibly to benefit people in the physical world. This role is focused on ensuring safe humanoid robot actions spanning agentic reasoning, HRI scenarios, and physical safety with VLA models. The Role Research Scientists work on a diverse and stimulating range of projects including: inventing algorithms and prototype applications, working with real robots in the lab and outside the lab tackling real world use cases. Research Scientists work in large collaborative teams to make cutting edge breakthroughs to advance Robotics AI. We believe large foundation models will transform general purpose Robotics like with our Gemini Robotics models. This role will involve working with a diverse multi-functional team that builds the future of robotics.

Requirements

• PhD in a technical field or equivalent practical experience.
• Knowledge of the latest in large machine learning research.
• Experience working with real-world robots

Nice To Haves

• Research track record in one or more of the following topics: Humanoid Whole Body Control, Vision Language Action models; Motion Planning, Force Control, AI Safety, Diffusion Policies, World Models, Imitation Learning and Reinforcement Learning, Sim2Real Transfer, Alignment Techniques
• Expertise in using large datasets with deep neural networks to make real robots useful

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, train and evaluate large models and algorithms for humanoid robots.
• Make breakthroughs and unlock new humanoid safety capabilities.
• Areas of focus include: Algorithmic and model development to improve a robot agent's understanding of it’s own embodiment and VLA capabilities; Learned policies for appropriate responses around people, and responses in atypical situations such actuator faults; Human Robot Interaction
• Write software to implement research ideas and iterate quickly.
• Leverage your expertise to participate in a wide variety of research: learning from simulation, reinforcement learning, learning from demonstrations, vision-language-action models, transformers, video generation, robot control, humanoid robots and more.
• Work effectively with a large collaborative team with fast-paced agendas to meet ambitious research goals.
• Generate creative ideas, set up experiments and test hypotheses.
• Report and present research findings clearly and efficiently both internally and externally.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree