Robotics Applied Scientist, Spatio-Temporal Scene Understanding & Memory

FieldAI’s Irvine team is where embodied AI meets real robots, real sensors, and real field deployments. Based in the heart of Southern California’s robotics ecosystem, we build risk-aware, reliable, field-ready AI systems that solve the hardest problems in robotics and unlock the full potential of embodied intelligence. If you want your work to ship, get tested on hardware, and improve through real deployments, Irvine is the place.

We go beyond typical data-driven approaches or pure transformer-only architectures, combining rigorous engineering with learning systems proven in globally deployed solutions that deliver results today and get better every time our robots run in the field.

• Investigate the appropriate representation for the robot's mission memory: a persistent spatio-temporal representation of what it saw, where, when, and how it changed, across missions and sites, so assets that move, disappear, or degrade are tracked rather than rediscovered.

• Build world models that let the robot reason and plan over that memory and recover physical parameters through interaction for physics-aware digital twins.

• Combine learned and physically grounded models, with geometry and dynamics as the ground truth.

• Bridge the perception-reasoning gap for long-term autonomy.

• PhD in robotics, computer science, electrical engineering, aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, or a related field, with publications at top venues such as RSS, CoRL, ICRA, IROS, T-FR, T-RO, CVPR, NeurIPS, or similar, on scene understanding, semantic SLAM, lifelong or spatio-temporal mapping, world models, or embodied reasoning.

• Hands-on experience with vision-language or foundation models applied to spatial reasoning, memory, or long-horizon embodied question answering.

• Depth in 3D representations: scene graphs, neural or Gaussian-splat maps, or object-centric maps, and the estimation underneath them.

• Strong Python; able to run your methods on real robots with C++ and ROS 2.

• Clear thinking about what a representation is for and how to evaluate it, and comfort with a fast-paced environment where research questions are set by what the next deployment needs.

• Change detection or long-term mapping results from real deployments.

• Real2
  
  Sim, system identification through interaction, or digital-twin work.

• Experience with behavior trees or task planning driven by language models.

• Industrial or field robotics exposure.

Our salary range is generous and we consider each individual’s background and experience when determining final compensation. Base pay may vary based on role scope, job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and the Irvine, California market.

Why Join FieldAI in Irvine?

In Irvine, you will work where the robots are. Our local team builds and tests systems on real hardware with real sensors, then ships them to operate in unstructured, previously unknown environments around the world. We are solving one of robotics’ hardest challenges: reliable deployment outside the lab. Our Field Foundational Models™ raise the bar for perception, planning, localization, and manipulation, with an emphasis on explainability and safety for real-world use.

You will collaborate with a world-class team that thrives on creativity, resilience, and bold thinking. We bring deep experience from organizations such as Deep Mind, NASA JPL, Boston Dynamics, NVIDIA, Amazon, Tesla Autopilot, Cruise, Zoox, Toyota Research Institute, and SpaceX, along with a track record of field deployments and strong performance in DARPA challenge segments.

Be Part of the Next Robotics Revolution

We are looking for builders who want their work to leave the whiteboard and show up on robots. If you enjoy tackling tough,…