Researcher, Robot Intelligence

About the Lab

The Robot Intelligence Lab at Samsung Research America is a new facility dedicated to advancing the field of robotics through cutting-edge research and development. The lab’s mission is to develop advanced technologies to power intelligent robotic systems capable of manipulation, navigation, and complex reasoning for a variety of high-impact application areas. The lab collaborates closely with external entities such as universities, startups, and government labs, as well as with several Samsung Product and Advanced Research labs.

About the Role

As the Robot Intelligence Lab grows, we will be hiring Researchers across multiple career levels, including Senior, Staff, and Senior Staff. The level at which a candidate is hired will reflect their experience, technical expertise, and demonstrated impact. Our ideal candidate explores novel technologies aimed at generalizing robots to perform tasks in the real world. Samsung’s unique advantage in the consumer electronics market and growing focus on AI and robotics will provide exciting technical challenges and a rewarding career experience. Your work will define Samsung’s future in robotics and significantly impact real-world users.

We are hiring for multiple groups within the lab (Reasoning, Dexterity, Data Efficiency, and Robot Systems), and responsibilities and required skills will vary by group.

Responsibilities

• Conduct state-of-the-art research to push boundaries in emerging fields of robotics, including task-and-motion planning (TAMP), world action models (WAMs), vision-language-action (VLA) models, vision language models (VLMs), open-world 3D perception, dexterous manipulation, real2sim2real, whole-body control, and multimodal (vision, tactile, audio, semantic) data fusion.
• Work with the team to explore novel techniques, device interfaces, and model architectures to train robotic policies effectively with limited available data.
• Design autonomy architectures that interpret high-level task instructions and generate low-level task commands.
• Enable real-time video encoders with multi-view inputs for robust scene understanding, enable VLMs to reason about general task knowledge (including tool usage, object interactions, and task feasibility assessment), and enable Chain-of-Thought (CoT) task reasoning on VLM for complex, multi-step task execution.
• Develop efficient 3D scene graph representations and other 3D semantic/geometric models/solutions.
• Scale robot evaluation pipelines across robot fleets with a combination of simulation and real-world testing.
• Work within cross-functional, cross-divisional teams and assist in the design, analysis, and performance evaluation from concept to completion.
• Generate patents and scientific research papers for top-tier publications.

Requirements

• PhD degree in EECS/Robotics or equivalent combination of education, training, and experience.
• 2-14+ years’ experience in robotics.
• Strong research track record with publications in top-tier robotics, computer vision, or ML venues (e.g., ICRA, RSS, Science Robotics, CVPR, ICCV, ICML, NeurIPS).

Skills

• Strong understanding of robotics fundamentals, including locomotion, manipulation, sensor inputs, pose tracking, 3D mapping, SLAM, ROS, and policy architectures, particularly for semi-structured and unstructured environments.
• Experience with foundation models, vision-language-action (VLA) models, vision language models (VLMs), and agentic architectures.
• Solid understanding of computer vision techniques (e.g., object detection, segmentation, tracking) and real-time video tokenizer design and multi-view image processing.
• Knowledgeable of tools and processes to monitor model performance and data quality, including model tuning experience.
• Familiarity with PyTorch, TensorFlow, C, C++, Java, ROS, and CUDA.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to work independently and as part of a team.
• Excellent verbal communication and writing skills to effectively represent derived results and technical concepts.

Pay

Base pay range: $163,600 - $324,500 USD. Individual rates depend on factors including the role’s function and location, as well as the individual’s knowledge, skills, experience, education, and training. This is part of a comprehensive compensation package that includes annual bonus eligibility and generous benefits.

Essential Job Functions

This position will be performed in an office setting. The role requires sitting and standing at a desk, communicating in person and by telephone, and frequently operating standard office equipment, such as telephones and computers.