Robotics Software Engineer, Multimodal Inspection

Description

The Irvine team works on embodied AI running on real robots, sensors, and field deployments. Based in Southern California's robotics ecosystem, it builds risk-aware, reliable, field-ready AI systems for hard robotics problems.

The approach goes beyond data-driven methods and transformer-only architectures, pairing rigorous engineering with learning systems already deployed globally. Systems improve each time the robots run in the field.

Teams cover AI, software, robotics engineering, product, field deployment, and technical communication. The work focuses on shipping systems that perform in the real world.

Responsibilities

• Build inspection sensing beyond visible-light cameras, from raw signal to usable insight, including radiometric thermal, gas detection, and acoustic signatures.
• Combine these sensing modalities into the perception and mission pipeline.
• Build logic that activates robot behaviors based on sensor readings.
• Send per-asset evidence and alerts into the data platform and on-premises systems.
• Evaluate multimodal inspection performance using data from real-world deployments.

Requirements

• A master's degree in robotics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, computer science, or a related field, plus 3+ years building sensing software for real robots.
• Strong C++ and Python skills, with ROS 2 experience integrating sensor drivers and real-time pipelines.
• Hands-on work with camera and thermal calibration, cross-modal registration, and the 3D geometry needed to project detections between sensors.
• Experience meeting real-time limits, including latency budgets, handling sensor dropouts, and storing data through network outages.
• A field mindset: you have debugged a sensor on a robot somewhere far from a desk.
• Set you apart: optical gas imaging, multi-gas sensing, or radiometric thermal analysis.
• Set you apart: acoustic anomaly detection for rotating machinery.
• Set you apart: predictive maintenance integrations such as CMMS or SCADA, or functional safety experience.
• Set you apart: applying foundation models to thermal or non-RGB imagery.

Conditions

The headquarters and this role are in Irvine, California, and the team works closely with colleagues across the US and worldwide.

Pay is set individually, based on role scope, job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and the Irvine, California market. The salary range is described as generous.

Equal opportunity: candidates are evaluated on merit, qualifications, and performance, without regard to any legally protected status.

Benefits

• Work where the robots are: the Irvine team builds and tests systems on real hardware with real sensors, then ships them into unstructured, previously unknown environments worldwide.
• Contribute to Field Foundational Models that advance perception, planning, localization, and manipulation, with a focus on explainability and safety for real-world use.
• Join a team with experience from DeepMind, NASA JPL, Boston Dynamics, NVIDIA, Amazon, Tesla Autopilot, Cruise, Zoox, Toyota Research Institute, and SpaceX, and a track record in DARPA challenge segments.