AI Perception Engineer

Location:

Fremont, CA - Hybrid (2 days onsite / 3 days remote)

Compensation
: $180K-$280K base, depending on experience + Equity + Full Benefits

No C2C Candidates

• We are partnering with a rapidly growing robotics company developing intelligent robotic systems for real‑world industrial and automation environments. The organization is building advanced autonomous systems that combine AI, computer vision, 3D perception, robotics software, and manipulation to solve complex physical‑world problems.
• The team is seeking a Staff AI Perception Engineer to take significant technical ownership of its production perception capabilities. This position will focus heavily on 3D computer vision, object localization, pose estimation, scene understanding, sensor data, and real‑time deployment on robotic hardware.
• This is a senior, hands‑on individual contributor role for someone who can bridge advanced perception research with production robotics. The ideal candidate has experience taking perception technology beyond prototypes and deploying it successfully on physical robotic systems operating in dynamic, real‑world environments.

• You will help define the technical direction and architecture of a production‑grade AI perception platform while remaining deeply involved in hands‑on engineering.
• The role requires an engineer who understands that successful robotics perception involves more than achieving strong model accuracy. You will evaluate tradeoffs involving performance, reliability, inference speed, compute limitations, data quality, system complexity, maintainability, and product delivery requirements.
• As a Staff‑level engineer, you will also provide technical leadership across projects, participate in architecture and design decisions, mentor other engineers, troubleshoot difficult production issues, and collaborate closely with teams working across autonomy, manipulation, planning, controls, and core robotics software.

• Lead the technical direction of key AI and perception initiatives while remaining hands‑on with development, integration, testing, and production debugging.
• Architect and improve production‑grade 3D perception systems used by physical robots operating in real‑world environments.
• Develop perception pipelines involving 3D object localization, pose estimation, segmentation, scene understanding, and environmental reconstruction.
• Work with RGB‑D cameras, depth sensing, point clouds, and other robotic sensing modalities.
• Optimize perception algorithms and models for deployment on onboard robotic compute with strict latency and runtime requirements.
• Translate promising research approaches into reliable, maintainable production systems.
• Make engineering decisions that balance model performance with compute resources, robustness, data requirements, scalability, and delivery schedules.
• Partner with robotics engineers across planning, manipulation, controls, autonomy, and systems engineering to ensure perception performs reliably as part of the complete robotic system.
• Lead technical and architectural reviews and help establish engineering best practices.
• Mentor engineers and provide technical guidance on complex perception and robotics problems.
• Diagnose performance and reliability issues occurring on deployed robotic systems.
• Help shape the longer‑term roadmap for perception, computer vision, and AI capabilities.

• MS or PhD in Robotics, Computer Vision, Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a closely related technical discipline.
• 5+ years of professional experience developing AI, computer vision, or robotic perception systems.
• Proven experience taking perception technology from research, prototype, or early development into production and…