About the Company - We’re a Series A rocket ship re‑imagining how physical products are built. By fusing large‑scale imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and vision‑language‑action (VLA) models, we give robots the judgment to tackle the messy edge‑cases of factory assembly. Our customers already rely on us to keep million‑dollar lines running—now we’re scaling from “cool demo” to industry standard.
About the Role - 2025 is the year autonomy jumps the lab wall. As our first Senior/Staff‑level AI hire after the Series A close, you’ll own the brains of a new generation of factory robots:
- Ship research, not slide decks. Your models go to production lines within weeks, not years.
- See impact at scale. Each model you deploy unlocks 10–40% production gains and gets us one step closer to reshoring manufacturing to the US.
- Shape the technical culture. You’ll set coding standards, review research directions, and mentor the next wave of roboticists.
Responsibilities
- System vision - Define a multi‑year autonomy roadmap: perception → policy → fleet‑level learning.
- Architecture - Design end‑to‑end VLA pipelines (PyTorch → TensorRT) that meet 100 ms control‑loop budgets.
- Sim‑to‑real at scale - Build self‑serve sim farms (Isaac Gym + domain randomization) and data‑driven calibration that cuts physical bring‑up time significantly.
- Technical leadership - Set coding and research standards, unblock teams, and mentor senior+ engineers.
- Cross‑functional impact - Co‑design sensors with EE/ME, influence product road‑maps, and brief execs & customers on autonomy strategy.
Qualifications and Required Skills
- Hands‑on with vision‑language‑action (VLA) or diffusion‑policy models; experience adapting open‑weight LLMs for embodied control.
- Hold an MS/PhD—or equivalent scar tissue—in Robotics, CS, EE or Applied Math.
- Have 6+ yrs delivering ML‑powered robots, AVs, or complex real‑time systems—including at least one product that shipped.
- Architect deep‑learning stacks in PyTorch/TensorFlow; squeeze them into real‑time constraints with C++/CUDA.
- Thrive on high ownership and ambiguous, first‑of‑kind problems.
- Enjoy startup speed: light process and direct access to customers.
Preferred Skills
- ISO 10218, IEC 61508, functional‑safety tooling, and real‑time monitoring for collision/risk envelopes.
- Large‑scale Isaac Gym / MuJoCo farms, procedurally generated assets, and sim‑to‑real gap metrics.
- First‑author papers at CoRL / RSS / ICRA or maintainer status on a widely‑used robotics‑AI repo.
Pay range and compensation package
- $210k-$300k
- Meaningful equity
- 401k + Health Insurance