Director of Autonomy - Biped

Humanoid is hiring a Director of Autonomy to lead development of reliable bipedal robot capabilities for locomanipulation tasks in homes and service environments. The role combines team leadership and roadmap ownership with hands-on policy training, data curation, and robot debugging, while collaborating across Controls, Simulation, Core Technology, Hardware Design, and Product.

Responsibilities:

• Own The Capability Roadmap: Work with product to identify use-case priority, choose the execution strategy, define the evals, and deliver on the agreed timeline
• Lead The Team: Hire, develop, and manage a team of robot learning engineers; set engineering and experimental standards; run day-to-day prioritization
• Co-Own The System 0/1 Interface: Agree with the Controls team on what the policy commands (end-effector targets, root velocity, pelvis height, foot targets, hand joint targets), debug failures across that boundary, and push requirements into the whole-body control roadmap
• Partner On Data Strategy: Specify what good data looks like for bipedal locomanipulation with data collection and external acquisition organizations, ensure diversity and coverage, iterate on operator instructions, and supervise collection on the biped
• Drive Sim-To-Real Transfer: Work with the Simulation team to set up RL training on the digital twin for bipedal tasks, then iterate on reward and simulation quality to ensure transfer to the real world
• Shape Base Model Development: Feed bipedal requirements — embodiment coverage in the pretraining mixture, action representations, latency budgets — into the VLA Core Technology team's base model development, and adopt new base models as they land
• Inform Hardware Design: Interface with the Hardware Design team so findings about hands, arms, and legs on the current generation are reflected in future designs
• Report On Progress: Communicate progress to leadership in terms of capabilities working on the robot, eval results, and failure analysis