The Staff AI Research Engineer, Perception will develop and deploy advanced perception models for robotic systems, focusing on object detection and scene understanding, optimizing for real-world performance.
Why RoboForce
RoboForce is an AI robotics company developing Physical AI–powered Robo-Labor for dull, dirty, and dangerous work. The company's robots are engineered for demanding industrial environments, with a focus on real-world deployment and scalability.
We are seeking a Staff AI Research Engineer, Perception to lead robot perception capabilities from research to real-world deployment. In this role, you will develop and ship production-grade perception models — spanning object detection, pose estimation, depth estimation, and scene understanding — directly onto RoboForce robotic platforms operating in demanding industrial environments.
Responsibilities
- Develop and own state-of-the-art perception models for object detection, 6-DoF pose estimation, depth estimation, multi-object tracking, and multi-sensor fusion from research through to on-robot deployment.
- Build and optimize full perception stacks end-to-end — from data preparation and model training to quantization, TensorRT conversion, and inference optimization on robot compute hardware.
- Implement multi-task learning pipelines and distributed training workflows to maximize model efficiency and generalization across diverse industrial scenarios.
- Profile and optimize deployed perception models for latency, throughput, and memory constraints on embedded robot hardware.
- Collaborate with manipulation and foundation model teams to integrate perception outputs — object poses, depth maps, scene graphs — into downstream robot control policies.
Requirements
- Master's degree in Machine Learning, AI, Robotics, or a related field with 4+ years of industry experience, or a PhD degree.
- Expertise in modern computer vision architectures and perception techniques including detection, segmentation, pose estimation, and depth estimation.
- Proven experience deploying perception models to production systems — including model optimization, quantization, and inference runtime engineering (e.g., TensorRT, ONNX Runtime).
- Experience with deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow, and strong proficiency in Python and C++.
- Strong understanding of linear algebra, projective geometry, probabilistic theory, and numerical optimization, with practical experience implementing these in real systems.
- Requires 5 days/week in-office collaboration with the teams.
Bonus Qualifications
- Experience deploying perception models on embedded or edge hardware (e.g., NVIDIA Jetson, Orin) in robotics or autonomous systems.
- Familiarity with 3D perception techniques — point cloud processing, neural rendering, 3D reconstruction, or NeRF/Gaussian Splatting.
- Proven ability to scale perception training across GPU clusters and design robust data pipelines for large-scale visual datasets.
- Publication at top computer vision or robotics conferences (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICRA, CoRL).
Benefits
- Competitive stock options/equity programs.
- Health, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k) plan.
- Visa sponsorship and green card support for qualified candidates.
- Lunches and dinners, a fully stocked kitchen, and regular team-building events.
RoboForce Milpitas, California, USA Office
Milpitas, California , United States, 95035
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