Robotics Software Engineer, Vision-Language Reasoning & Behaviors

Description

The company builds embodied AI that runs on real robots, sensors, and field deployments. The Irvine team is in Southern California's robotics hub.

The systems are risk-aware, reliable, and built for the field. They combine careful engineering with learning systems already used in deployed solutions worldwide, and they improve as the robots run in the field.

The approach goes beyond standard data-driven methods and transformer-only designs. Work here ships, gets tested on hardware, and improves through real deployments.

Responsibilities

• Develop visual reasoning and inspection algorithms and pipelines for real-world deployments.
• Build inspection and robot behaviors as reusable primitives.
• Run on-edge vision-language inference inside the behavior loop, within real compute and latency limits.
• Make the robot's reasoning and judgment easy to inspect, and integrate them across the mission workflow.

Requirements

• An MS in robotics, computer science, aerospace engineering, electrical engineering, or a related field, plus 3+ years building software that runs on real robots.
• Strong C++ and Python.
• Hands-on ROS 2 experience designing nodes and systems that have shipped.
• Working knowledge of behavior trees and computer vision.
• Experience integrating learned models into a robotics system.
• Would set you apart: experience with open-vocabulary detection or visual grounding using VLMs on robots.
• Would set you apart: GPU inference optimization on embedded hardware, using TensorRT, quantization, or ONNX.
• Would set you apart: thermal imaging or anomaly detection against reference imagery.
• Would set you apart: deployments on legged platforms in industrial environments.

Conditions

Pay is a generous range, set by looking at each person's background and experience.

Base pay may vary with role scope, job knowledge, skills, experience, and the Irvine, California market.

The Irvine headquarters is the base, and the team works with colleagues across the US and abroad.

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

Benefits

• In Irvine, you work directly on the hardware. The local team builds and tests systems on real robots with real sensors, then ships them to operate in unfamiliar, unstructured environments worldwide.
• The company works on reliable deployment outside the lab, with Field Foundational Models that push perception, planning, localization, and manipulation, with a focus on explainability and safety.
• You join a team with experience from DeepMind, NASA JPL, Boston Dynamics, NVIDIA, Amazon, Tesla Autopilot, Cruise, Zoox, Toyota Research Institute, and SpaceX, with a record of field deployments and strong results in DARPA challenge segments.