Research Scientist, Human‑ai Perception and Interaction Research - Phd New College Grad 2026

NVIDIA · Semiconductors · Santa Clara, CA

Research Scientist role focused on advancing AI in areas like gaming and robotics by understanding and shaping human perception, learning, and behavior through the lens of vision science, HCI, and HRI. The role involves proposing, researching, prototyping, and testing innovative ideas, publishing at top conferences, and collaborating with researchers and product engineers. Requires a PhD or equivalent research experience and a strong publication record.

What you'd actually do

  1. Propose, research, prototype and test innovative research ideas.
  2. Publish at top conferences and patent novel inventions.
  3. Collaborate with other research team members, external researchers, and mentor interns.
  4. Create working interactive demonstrations to showcase your research ideas.
  5. Participate in technology transfer with engineers around NVIDIA as ideas "graduate" from research to product.

Skills

Required

  • Ph.D. or equivalent research experience in Computer Science/Electrical Engineering/Cognitive Science or related field
  • Excellent track record of publications in top-tier conferences (SIGGRAPH, CHI, HRI, ICRA, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, CoG, ETRA, etc.)
  • Experience with studying human behaviors in related application domains such as gaming, driving, interacting with robots, etc.
  • Proficiency with Python, Rust, and/or C++
  • Experience with AI model training and evaluation frameworks, like PyTorch

Nice to have

  • Demonstrated public portfolio (e.g. repositories, OSS contributions, notebooks, packages, or technical blog posts with code)
  • Experience with multi-node, multi-GPU training and inference workflows
  • Familiarity with and interest in modern deep learning models, including working with large-scale, multi-modal foundation models (such as recent LLMs, VLMs)
  • A track record of applying human behavior models to machine learning applications, or applying machine learning to understand or model human behavior

What the JD emphasized

  • Ph.D. or equivalent research experience
  • Excellent track record of publications in top-tier conferences
  • Experience with AI model training and evaluation frameworks

Other signals

  • research
  • human-AI interaction
  • perception
  • learning
  • behavior
  • vision science
  • HCI
  • HRI
  • AI innovation