AI Engineer

Our client, an early-stage, AI-driven startup in the defense industry, is hiring an AI Engineer to join their team in California. The successful candidate will design and deploy advanced multimodal models that power the cognitive capabilities of their robotic platforms, playing a key role in shaping the next generation of intelligent defense systems.

• Design, train, and assess advanced VLA models for robotic platforms.
• Develop scalable architectures for multimodal integration, continual learning and domain adaptation.
• Build dynamic memory, communication and tool-use capabilities for autonomous AI agents.
• Translate state-of-the-art research into real-time, deployable perception and decision-making systems.
• Collaborate with robotics and mission teams to integrate ML pipelines with onboard autonomy.
• Maintain and optimise codebases for training, simulation and real-world inference.
• Evaluate performance and robustness in complex, unstructured and adversarial environments.
• Monitor and incorporate the latest advances in VLMs, reinforcement learning, computer vision and autonomous systems.
• Support field testing and mission operations to validate models under real-world conditions.

• PhD or Masters degree or higher in Computer Science, AI or similar.
• At least 2 years of hands-on experience building and deploying AI systems, preferably in agentic AI, robotics, autonomous systems or real-time applications.
• Strong foundation in computer vision, deep learning or multimodal architectures, including VLMs, transformers or autonomous agents.
• Proficiency in Python and PyTorch or Tensor Flow. Bonus points for experience with JAX, CUDA, or real-time inference optimisation.
• Experience with distributed training, fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning.
• Demonstrated ability to take research from prototype to production in fast-paced environments.
• Experience with embodied AI systems.
• Background in mission-oriented deployments, such as DoD, aerospace or robotics is a bonus.

• Base Salary: $160k - $220k DOE. Exceptional candidates may be considered for higher compensation.
• Equity.
• Performance bonus.
• Medical, dental and vision coverage.