Principal Research Scientist

Job Description:
Your Opportunity
Chewy Robotics is seeking a Principal Research Scientist to join our Physical AI team in Woburn, MA. This is a senior individual contributor role for a scientist who can define and advance Chewy's research roadmap in embodied AI for humanoid and other high-DOF robotic systems.
You will lead breakthrough work at the intersection of reinforcement learning, imitation learning, vision-language-action models, multimodal perception, whole-body control, manipulation, and sim-to-real adaptation. You will help Chewy develop the next generation of robotic intelligence for physically demanding, high-variability workflows in real operating environments.
This role is for a scientist who is equally comfortable doing first-principles thinking and using modern large-scale learning methods. You should be excited to invent new algorithms, build evaluation frameworks, guide technical direction across teams, and turn research ideas into capabilities that work on real robots. Success in this role means raising Chewy's scientific ambition while also creating measurable progress on hardware.
You will partner closely with roboticists, controls engineers, ML engineers, software engineers, and operations stakeholders to develop systems that can perceive, reason, learn, and act safely and robustly in the physical world.
What You'll Do

• Define and lead Chewy's scientific roadmap for embodied AI and humanoid robot learning, with emphasis on reinforcement learning, imitation learning, VLA-style policy learning, and modern control approaches for real-world robotic systems
• Invent, prototype, and validate novel algorithms for manipulation, loco-manipulation, whole-body coordination, multimodal perception, policy adaptation, and task generalization across environments and robot embodiments
• Develop learning systems that combine data-driven policies with principled robotics methods such as planning, control, system identification, estimation, and safety-constrained execution
• Drive advances in simulation, synthetic data generation, offline and online evaluation, benchmarking, and sim-to-real transfer to accelerate learning and reduce time to deployment
• Build and evaluate robot learning pipelines that leverage vision, language, proprioception, force, and touch to enable robust performance on complex physical tasks
• Partner with cross-functional teams to translate ambiguous business needs into tractable scientific programs, technical milestones, and experimental roadmaps
• Influence the architecture of Chewy's physical AI stack, including model training strategy, data engines, evaluation methodology, and integration with real robot platforms
• Establish technical standards for scientific rigor, experiment design, ablation studies, reproducibility, and model evaluation across the team
• Publish, patent, and communicate high-impact work internally and externally, helping strengthen Chewy's reputation in robotics and embodied AI
• Mentor scientists and engineers, raise the bar for technical depth and judgment, and serve as a trusted technical advisor to senior leadership

What You'll Need

• PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Applied Mathematics, or a related technical field
• 10+ years of relevant experience in robotics research, embodied AI, machine learning, controls, or a closely related domain
• Deep expertise in several of the following areas
  • reinforcement learning
  • imitation learning or behavior cloning
  • offline RL or policy improvement from logged data
  • vision-language-action models or embodied foundation models
  • robot manipulation and loco-manipulation
  • whole-body control, MPC, or optimization-based control
  • system identification, state estimation, or sensor fusion
  • sim-to-real transfer and domain adaptation
• Demonstrated track record of developing novel methods that improved real robot performance, not just offline benchmarks
• Strong publication, patent, and/or open-source record in top-tier robotics or machine learning venues such as CoRL, RSS, ICRA, IROS, NeurIPS, ICML, or related forums
• Strong software and research engineering skills in Python and C++, with experience in modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch and/or JAX
• Experience with robotics tooling and simulation environments such as ROS2, Isaac Lab, Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, Gazebo, or equivalent platforms
• Proven ability to operate as a top-level technical leader in ambiguous environments, influence without authority, and communicate effectively with executive stakeholders

Bonus

• Experience training and deploying policies on humanoid robots or other dynamically complex platforms such as legged robots or mobile manipulators
• Experience with dexterous or force-sensitive manipulation, deformable object handling, or contact-rich tasks
• Experience building or adapting foundation models for robotics, including multimodal representation learning or action modeling
• Experience combining learned policies with classical controls, planners, or safety layers for production-grade systems
• Experience working on warehouse, logistics, or industrial robotics applications
• Experience leading external collaborations with academic labs, research partners, or strategic technical vendors

Why You'll Love This Role

• You will define foundational technical direction in one of Chewy's most ambitious investment areas
• You will have the freedom to work on long-horizon scientific problems while staying close to real hardware and real operational impact
• You will help shape how embodied AI gets built inside a company with meaningful physical problems, strong executive interest, and room to create new capabilities from the ground up

The base salary range for this role is $213,000 - $300,000.00.

• The specific salary offered to a candidate may be influenced by a variety of factors including but not limited to the candidate's relevant experience, education, and work location. In addition, this position is eligible for 401k and a new hire and annual equity grant. C08+ positions may also be eligible for annual bonus.

We offer different types of insurance and benefits, such as medical/Rx, vision, dental, life, disability, hospital indemnity, critical illness, and accident. We offer parental leave, family services benefits, backup dependent care, flexible spending accounts, telemedicine, pet adoption reimbursement, employee assistance program, and many discounts including 10% off pet insurance and 20% off at Chewy.com.
Exempt salary team members have unlimited PTO, subject to manager approval. Team members will receive six paid holidays per year. Team members may be eligible for paid sick and family leave in compliance with applicable state and local regulations.
Chewy is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, gender, citizenship, marital status, religion, age, disability, gender identity, results of genetic testing, veteran status, as well as any other legally-protected characteristic. If you have a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act or similar law, and you need an accommodation during the application process or to perform these job requirements, or if you need a religious accommodation, please contact [email protected].
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