Senior Perception Learning Engineer Sunnyvale, CA

Apptronik is a human-centered robotics company developing AI-powered robots to support humanity in every facet of life. Our flagship humanoid robot, Apollo, is built to collaborate thoughtfully with people, starting with critical industries such as manufacturing and logistics, with future applications in healthcare, the home, and beyond.
We operate at the cutting edge of Applied AI, applying our expertise across the full robotics stack to solve some of society's most important problems. You will join a team dedicated to bringing Apollo to market at scale, tackling the complex challenges like safety, commercialization, and mass production to change the world for the better.

You will drive research and development of advanced perception systems that empower Apptronik’s humanoid robots to understand and interact with complex human environments. Your work will focus heavily on SLAM, visual-inertial odometry, world modeling, and learning-based perception, alongside object detection and multi-sensor fusion, creating the foundation for robust autonomy in real-world settings.

You will design and optimize deep learning models for real-time detection, tracking, segmentation, scene understanding, and state estimation while contributing to scalable pipelines for training, evaluation, and deployment. You will also integrate data from multiple modalities—Cameras, LiDAR, depth sensors, and IMUs—into unified world models that support navigation, manipulation, safety, and human-robot interaction.

This role requires balancing research innovation with practical engineering to deliver deployable, high-performance SLAM and perception stacks. You will collaborate across Reinforcement Learning teams, Platform Software team, and Systems teams, and contribute to shaping Apptronik’s perception and autonomy roadmap. Your work will directly accelerate the development of humanoid robots that can safely operate in human spaces, adapt to dynamic environments, and extend human capability.

• Lead Design, develop, and optimize perception and SLAM pipelines for humanoid robots, including visual-inertial odometry, mapping, localization, object detection, tracking, segmentation, pose estimation, and scene understanding.
• Develop multi-sensor fusion frameworks that integrate cameras, LiDAR, depth sensors, and IMUs for robust real-time state estimation and mapping in dynamic human-centered environments.
• Contribute to scalable data pipelines, training infrastructure, and inference frameworks to accelerate model development, evaluation, and deployment.
• Drive research and deployment of learning-based models for SLAM, 3D scene understanding, and perception optimized for humanoid locomotion, manipulation, and human-robot interaction.
• Implement performance profiling, regression testing, and telemetry systems to ensure perception and SLAM modules meet strict latency, accuracy, and reliability requirements on edge devices.
• Collaborate with planning, control, and hardware teams to define perception-to-action interfaces, ensuring real-time compatibility with locomotion and manipulation pipelines.
• Guide the integration of synthetic data (e.g., simulation frameworks like Isaac Sim) with real-world datasets to enhance model generalization and robustness.
• Contribute to best practices in code quality, model versioning, reproducibility, and deployment.

• MS/PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Computer Engineering, or related field.
• 3- 5+ years building and shipping perception and/or SLAM systems in robotics or real-time vision applications.
• Strong background in SLAM, VIO, probabilistic state estimation, and deep learning for computer vision.
• Practical expertise in detection, segmentation, multi-object tracking,…