Senior AI Research Scientist in Bristol

Job Title

Senior Robotics Engineer

Department

Robotics Software Engineering

The Senior AI Research Scientist will develop new learning methods for general-purpose robot behaviour, identifying high-value research questions, building and testing original approaches, and working with engineers to translate the strongest results into capabilities that operate reliably on physical robots.

Key Duties/Responsibilities

• Research Strategy & Execution
• Set and execute ambitious research programmes in robot learning, multimodal representation learning, imitation learning, reinforcement learning and foundation models for embodied intelligence.
• Method Development
• Develop new methods for acquiring, generalising and adapting manipulation and whole-body skills from demonstrations, interaction data, simulation and deployment experience.
• Explore architectures that connect vision, language, action and robot state, including vision-language-action models, generative policies and hierarchical or modular approaches.
• Experimentation & Evaluation
• Design rigorous experiments, ablations and evaluation protocols that distinguish genuine capability improvements from benchmark or demonstration effects.
• Prototyping & Hardware Validation
• Build research prototypes and collaborate with robot-learning, controls, perception and platform engineers to validate them on physical hardware.
• Capability & Safety Research
• Improve data efficiency, robustness, transfer and continual adaptation across tasks, objects, environments and robot configurations.
• Investigate uncertainty, failure detection, recovery and safety-aware learning for systems operating around people and in changing environments.
• Communication & Scientific Leadership
• Communicate results through clear research plans, technical reports, internal talks and, where appropriate, high-quality publications or open-source contributions.
• Provide scientific leadership: challenge assumptions, review experimental work, mentor colleagues and help shape the longer-term embodied-AI roadmap.
• Performs other duties or takes on specialized responsibilities as assigned.

Supervisory Responsibilities

• None

Required Skills/Abilities/Qualifications

• A strong research track record in machine learning, robot learning, computer vision, reinforcement learning, multimodal AI or a closely related area.
• Evidence of original research contribution, demonstrated through influential publications, deployed methods, patents, open-source work or equivalent industrial research impact.
• Deep knowledge of modern deep-learning methods and excellent practical experience with Py Torch, large-scale experimentation and reproducible research code.
• Ability to turn loosely defined capability goals into testable hypotheses, well-designed experiments and clear technical conclusions.
• Experience working with high-dimensional sequential decision problems, multimodal data or learned control policies.
• Strong mathematical and statistical foundations, including the judgement to choose the right level of theoretical and empirical analysis.
• Ability to collaborate closely with engineering teams and adapt research methods to latency, compute, safety, data and hardware constraints.
• Clear written and verbal communication and a record of leading technically ambiguous work.

Preferred Skills/Abilities/Qualifications

• Learning on physical robots, especially manipulation, bimanual systems, humanoids or contact-rich tasks.
• Vision-language-action models, diffusion or flow-based policies, transformers and multimodal foundation models.
• Offline reinforcement learning, model-based RL, world models, inverse RL or learning from human feedback and demonstrations.
• Large-scale robot datasets, teleoperation data, autonomous data collection or synthetic-data generation.
• Sim-to-real transfer, domain adaptation, meta-learning, continual learning or test-time adaptation.
• Safety-aware learning, uncertainty estimation, out-of-distribution detection and recovery behaviour.
• Moving research from prototype to deployed robot behaviour and learning from field failures.

Education/Experience

• A Ph D in machine learning, robotics, computer science or a related field, or equivalent research experience and impact.

Physical Requirements

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job.

Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

• Prolonged periods of sitting/standing at a desk and working on a computer. The employee routinely is required to sit; stand, walk; talk and hear; use hands to keyboard.
• Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision, color vision, peripheral vision, depth perception, and ability to adjust focus.
• Ability to lift 30 lbs.
• Occasional travel to partner or pilot sites may be required.

Bear Robotics, Inc. is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.

We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, mental or physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship, or other characteristics protected by state or federal law or local ordinance.