Senior Manager, Software Engineering - Robotics Manipulation

NVIDIA•Durham, NC

34d•$272,000 - $488,750

About The Position

NVIDIA is seeking an exceptional engineering leader and manager to head up Isaac for Manipulation. This role is responsible for the strategy, roadmap, and execution for Manipulation, focusing on giving robotic arms and dexterous systems the perception, grasping, motion, and learned skills needed for real-world applications in manufacturing, logistics, and industrial automation. This high-visibility position involves growing and mentoring a team of robotics and machine-learning engineers, setting technical direction, and collaborating with the robotics ecosystem to establish NVIDIA as the default platform for robotic manipulation.

Requirements

BS, MS, or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, Electrical/Mechanical Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience).
12+ total years of relevant industry experience building robotics or robotics-adjacent systems.
3+ years leading, mentoring, and managing engineering teams.
Hands-on expertise with robotic arms, manipulation, and physics, including grasping, motion planning (numerical optimization and sampling-based approaches), and control (force/impedance and contact-rich control).
Experience with perception-guided manipulation.
Working understanding of GPU-accelerated computing and modern ML infrastructure.
Knowledge of how to architect robotics software to take advantage of CUDA, PyTorch, GPU-accelerated simulation, and edge inference.
Demonstrated ability to work directly with external partners, customers, and developer communities.
Ability to translate external needs into roadmap and shipping product.
Strong software engineering fundamentals in modern C++ and Python.
Ability to engage substantively in technical and architectural decisions with the team.

Nice To Haves

Experience building manipulation or industrial automation products at an established robot-arm company or manipulation startup.
Strong understanding of the product landscape including use cases, integrators, and platforms from leading vendors.
Track record building developer-facing or low-code platforms and tooling that abstract across multiple robot-arm brands.
Deep experience with imitation learning, reinforcement learning, sim-to-real transfer, or manipulation foundation models.
Experience shipping learned policies onto real hardware.
Contributions to ROS 2, ros2_control, MoveIt, or the broader robotics open-source and standards community.
Experience starting or scaling a product or team from the ground up.
Experience operating with speed in ambiguous, fast-pace problem spaces.

Responsibilities

Lead the Isaac Manipulation team, including recruiting, growing, and mentoring a high-performing team of robotics software engineers.
Set technical direction, raise the technical bar, and manage the team’s health, velocity, and delivery.
Collaborate with Product Management to define and drive the strategy and roadmap for grasping, motion planning and control, perception-for-manipulation, and learned manipulation policies.
Translate complex contact-rich manipulation tasks in manufacturing, logistics, assembly, and machine tending into robust, real-world capabilities.
Partner with NVIDIA Research, Isaac Sim/Lab teams, and foundation-model teams to integrate sim-to-real, imitation, and reinforcement learning approaches.
Serve as a technical representative for Isaac Manipulation to robot-arm OEMs, system integrators, and the developer community.
Gather requirements, run joint engineering efforts, and ensure APIs and tools meet real workflows.
Support the developer ecosystem through responsible migration handling of their solutions.
Drive architecture and execution to leverage NVIDIA GPUs, CUDA, and the accelerated-computing stack.
Own the planning and execution of complex, multi-functional programs, including quality, performance, and real-world deployment of learned policies and manipulation stacks.
Represent manipulation in platform-level technical and business decisions and influence NVIDIA's investment strategy in the robotics stack.