Senior Manager, Software Engineering - Robotics Manipulation

What You’ll Be Doing

• Lead the Isaac Manipulation team.
• Recruit, grow, and mentor a high-performing team of robotics software engineers; set direction, raise the technical bar, and manage the team’s health, velocity, and delivery.
• Shape the roadmap. 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 — from research to productized, supported platform capabilities.
• Apply creative solutions to real industrial problems. Translate the hardest contact-rich manipulation tasks in manufacturing, logistics, assembly, and machine tending into robust capabilities that work in the real world, not just the lab.
• Bridge research and product. Partner with NVIDIA Research, the Isaac Sim/Lab teams, and foundation-model teams (e.g., Isaac GR00T, Cosmos) to bring sim-to-real, imitation, and reinforcement learning approaches into the platform and onto physical arms.
• Engage partners and developers. Serve as a technical face of Isaac Manipulation to robot-arm OEMs, system integrators, and the developer community — gathering requirements, running joint engineering, and ensuring our APIs and tools meet real workflows. Support our ecosystem of developers through responsible migration handling of their solutions built on our durable platform.
• Leverage accelerated compute. Drive architecture and execution that fully uses NVIDIA GPUs, CUDA, and the accelerated-computing stack across simulation, training, and on-robot inference on Jetson and edge platforms.
• Deliver. Drive planning and execution of complex, multi-functional programs; own quality, performance, and the real-world deployment of learned policies and manipulation stacks on physical robots.
• Influence the strategy. Represent manipulation in platform-level technical and business decisions, and help shape where NVIDIA invests across the robotics stack.

What We Need To See

• 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, including 3+ years leading, mentoring, and managing engineering teams.
• Robotic arm depth. Hands-on expertise with robotic arms, manipulation, and physics from grasping, motion planning (across both numerical optimization and sampling-based approaches), and control (including force/impedance and contact-rich control) to perception-guided manipulation.
• Accelerated compute. Working understanding of GPU-accelerated computing and modern ML infrastructure, and how to architect robotics software to take advantage of it (CUDA, PyTorch, GPU-accelerated simulation, edge inference).
• Partner and developer interface. Demonstrated ability to work directly with external partners, customers, and developer communities and to translate their needs into roadmap and shipping product.
• Technical credibility. Strong software engineering fundamentals (modern C++ and Python) and the ability to engage substantively in technical and architectural decisions with your team.