Senior Director, Applied Science - Robotics
Oracle · Santa Clara, United States · 26d ago
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides organizations around the world with computing infrastructure and software to help them innovate, unlock efficiencies, and operate more effectively.
As Senior Director, Robotics, you will lead a high-impact organization responsible for advancing Oracle’s robotics strategy and delivering the technical, operational, and organizational capabilities required to deploy and manage robotic systems at scale. You will partner across applied science, engineering, product, hardware, security, operations, legal, finance, and executive leadership to translate customer and business needs into secure, reliable, and commercially viable robotics solutions.
You will lead teams building production-ready robotics capabilities across perception, sensor fusion, multimodal AI, embodied AI, robot planning, mission execution, telemetry, digital twins, device management, and cloud services. This role requires strong judgment across hardware and software boundaries, the ability to balance scientific innovation with operational rigor, and accountability for delivering scalable robotics platforms that create measurable customer and business value.
Responsibilities
Strategic Leadership: Set the scientific and technical direction for robotics, perception, and embodied AI initiatives. Collaborate with executive leadership to align product vision, applied research priorities, resource allocation, and delivery roadmaps.
Applied Research and Innovation: Lead teams of scientists, data engineers, machine learning engineers, and developers in applied research programs spanning multi-sensor fusion, real-time signals, perception systems, multimodal reasoning, reinforcement learning, planning, and decision-making.
Robotics Technology Development: Drive development and deployment of AI capabilities for robotic systems and related cloud services, including data collection, model architecture, training, evaluation, inference design, API integration, observability, and production monitoring.
Solution Identification and Prioritization: Partner with science, engineering, product, and hardware leaders to identify product needs where robotics and embodied AI can create measurable customer and business impact. Prioritize opportunities using feasibility, scientific rigor, customer impact, and risk/reward tradeoffs.
Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration: Foster productive collaboration between applied science, software engineering, machine learning engineering, product management, hardware teams, operations, and go-to-market stakeholders. Encourage knowledge sharing and joint problem-solving across disciplines.
Product Innovation: Translate scientific advances into practical, scalable, and marketable capabilities. Ensure delivered solutions are competitive, reliable, and aligned with customer needs and cloud service requirements.
Data, Evaluation, and Insights: Define dataset strategy, data quality standards, labeling approaches, synthetic or simulation data opportunities, evaluation protocols, product metrics, and operational feedback loops that guide technical decisions and future strategy.
Production Readiness and Quality Assurance: Establish standards for reliability, latency, robustness, safety, security, testing, documentation, code review, and deployment readiness. Serve as an escalation point for complex robotics, AI, perception, and systems integration issues.
Technical Leadership and Talent Development: Recruit, lead, mentor, and develop senior scientists and engineers. Raise the bar for applied research rigor, engineering quality, full-stack delivery, and executive-level communication.
Intellectual Property, Ecosystem Awareness, and Portfolio Management: Identify opportunities for patents, publications, white papers, demos, and reusable patterns. Stay current on robotics platforms, commercial robot APIs and SDKs, benchmarks, customer feedback, and competitive offerings while managing budgets and portfolio priorities.
Minimum Qualifications
15+ years of experience in robotics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, computer vision, perception, signal processing, statistical modeling, data mining, software engineering, or a related field; or equivalent degree-based experience in a relevant technical discipline.
Demonstrated experience leading applied science, research, machine learning, or engineering teams through complex technical programs from ambiguous problem framing through production delivery.
Proven ability to guide high-complexity technical decisions, evaluate tradeoffs, and communicate robotics and AI strategy to executive, technical, product, and cross-functional audiences.
Experience delivering AI, robotics, perception, embodied AI, or multimodal systems into production, customer-facing, or operational environments.
Preferred Skills and Experience
Ph.D. in Computer Science, Robotics, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Physics, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field is preferred.
Demonstrated experience leading research and development efforts within cloud services, AI platforms, robotics, embodied AI, computer vision, perception, or related technology organizations.
Exceptional leadership and team management abilities, including experience leading cross-functional teams, developing senior technical talent, and driving successful multi-team programs.
Strong business acumen and ability to align scientific efforts with company strategy, market demand, product priorities, customer impact, and budget constraints.
Excellent communication and presentation skills, with the ability to convey complex technical concepts and tradeoffs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, including the ability to diagnose production issues, improve observability and reliability, and guide durable root-cause solutions.
Experience creating patents, technical publications, white papers, peer-reviewed articles, design documents, or equivalent technical documentation.
Hands-on or leadership experience with commercial robot platforms, robot SDKs/APIs, simulation environments, telemetry systems, real-time constraints, and safety or reliability requirements.
Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment and adapt quickly to changing priorities, customer needs, and emerging technology opportunities.
Success Profile
Builds credibility as a senior applied science leader who can bridge research depth with pragmatic product delivery.
Operates comfortably across sensors, models, APIs, hardware/software boundaries, cloud services, and executive decision-making forums.
Raises the bar for AI adoption in robotics by creating reusable patterns, evaluation standards, and scalable delivery practices.
Certain U.S. based or U.S. customer or client-facing roles may be required to comply with applicable requirements, such as immunization/occupational health mandates, and/or drug testing requirements.
Range and benefit information provided in this posting are specific to the stated locations only
US: Hiring Range in USD from: $190,000 to $414,400 per annum. May be eligible for bonus, equity, and compensation deferral.
Oracle maintains broad salary ranges for its roles in order to account for variations in knowledge, skills, experience, market conditions and locations, as well as reflect Oracle's differing products, industries and lines of business.
Candidates are typically placed into the range based on the preceding factors as well as internal peer equity.
Oracle US offers a comprehensive benefits package which includes the following:
1. Medical, dental, and vision insurance, including expert medical opinion
2. Short term disability and long term disability
3. Life insurance and AD&D
4. Supplemental life insurance (Employee/Spouse/Child)
5. Health care and dependent care Flexible Spending Accounts
6. Pre-tax commuter and parking benefits
7. 401(k) Savings and Investment Plan with company match
8. Paid time off: Flexible Vacation is provided to all eligible employees assigned to a salaried (non-overtime eligible) position. Accrued Vacation is provided to all other employees eligible for vacation benefits. For employees working at least 35 hours per week, the vacation accrual rate is 13 days annually for the first three years of employment and 18 days annually for subsequent years of employment. Vacation accrual is prorated for employees working between 20 and 34 hours per week. Employees working fewer than 20 hours per week are not eligible for vacation.
9. 11 paid holidays
10. Paid sick leave: 72 hours of paid sick leave upon date of hire. Refreshes each calendar year. Unused balance will carry over each year up to a maximum cap of 112 hours.
11. Paid parental leave
12. Adoption assistance
13. Employee Stock Purchase Plan
14. Financial planning and group legal
15. Voluntary benefits including auto, homeowner and pet insurance
The role will generally accept applications for at least three calendar days from the posting date or as long as the job remains posted.
Career Level - M5