Robotics Data Pipeline Engineer

Job Title: Robotics Data Pipeline Engineer – Multimodal Data

Department: Software

Reports To: Teleoperations Lead

Employment Type: Full-Time

Location: Houston, TX or Pensacola Fl

Who We Are

Persona AI is building humanoid robots for the most demanding environments in heavy industry — shipyards, steel mills, fabrication facilities, and offshore platforms — performing welding, grinding, maintenance, inspection, and material-handling work that is dangerous, physically demanding, and increasingly difficult to staff.

We are backed by leading strategic and financial investors and engaged with global industrial leaders across Korea, Japan, the United States, and Singapore. Korea is the center of gravity for our early commercial strategy, anchored by relationships with the world’s leading shipbuilders and steelmakers. Our work spans both the robot platform itself and the systems, partners, and playbooks required to deploy it at scale.

Why Join Persona AI?

• We offer competitive compensation, a performance-based bonus, 99% employer covered medical benefits, early-stage equity, competitive PTO, and a company-wide paid winter break between December 24th and January 2nd.

• You’ll shape technology that’s redefining the possibilities of robotics and human interaction.

• Work alongside passionate teammates who value creativity, and continuous learning.

• Enjoy full access to advanced tools,

About the Role

As a Data Pipeline Engineer, you will architect and scale the data infrastructure that feeds our foundation models. Your primary mission is to extract, augment, and align human dexterous manipulation data from massive complex, multi-sensor and egocentric video datasets. Crucially, you will build advanced post-processing algorithms to perform deep force analysis and infer hidden states from raw data—such as processing direct force-torque outputs to quantify grasp dynamics, estimating contact forces from visual cues, extrapolating heavily occluded hand positions, or deriving 3D geometry from 2D frames. You will use spatial, temporal, and cross-modal data augmentation to multiply the value of every minute of data our teleoperation team collects.

What You Will Be Doing

• Multimodal Data Pipelines: Architect end-to-end ingestion pipelines that take raw, unstructured recordings—egocentric video, teleoperation sessions, third-party open datasets—and produce indexed, queryable, training-ready datasets. This includes temporal segmentation of long recordings into action clips, metadata and scene-graph extraction, embedding-based retrieval, and language annotation workflows.

• Force Analysis & Hidden State Inference: Design cross-modal validation systems that verify video, proprioception, force/haptic signals, and language annotations agree with each other—e.g., reprojecting robot state into the image plane to confirm video–state consistency, and VLM-assisted checks that instructions match observed behavior.

• Kinematic Retargeting & Alignment: orchestrating hand-tracking, segmentation, depth estimation, 3D reconstruction, and pose-tracking modules; retargeting human demonstrations into robot trajectories; and running simulation-in-the-loop validation (kinematic feasibility, physics replay, motion-consistency filtering) so synthesized data is physically grounded, not just visually plausible.

• Advanced Data Augmentation: Implement robust data augmentation strategies (spatial transformations, temporal scaling, synthetic viewpoints, and sensor noise injection) to expand expert trajectories and improve the robustness of our learning models.

• Teleoperation Synchronization: unified state–action representations across differing embodiments, coordinate frames, rotation conventions, gripper/hand parameterizations, and sampling rates—with per-dimension validity masking and per-source normalization so that adding a new robot or sensor is a configuration change, not a rewrite.

• Close the loop with data consumers: build the tooling that lets researchers query, visualize, and audit datasets (clip browsers, trajectory viewers, annotation review UIs), and turn model-failure analyses into new curation rules and targeted re-collection requests.

What We Are Looking For

• Education: M.S., or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Machine Learning, Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field.

• Programming & ML Frameworks: Deep expertise in Python and extensive experience with PyTorch, specifically in handling custom dataloaders for multimodal datasets.

• Force & Time-Series Data Processing: Experience analyzing and processing complex time-series data from force-torque (F/T) sensors, load cells, or tactile arrays, ensuring pristine alignment with visual frames.

• Video Processing Expertise: Mastery of video processing pipelines and libraries (OpenCV, FFmpeg, Decord) and managing the I/O bottlenecks of terabyte-scale video datasets.

• Solid working knowledge of 3D geometry and robotics data: coordinate frames and transforms, rotation representations, camera intrinsics/extrinsics, forward/inverse kinematics, URDF—enough to build automated checks that catch geometric inconsistencies in the data.

• Data Augmentation: Proven ability to implement programmatic and generative data augmentation techniques for computer vision and time-series data.

Bonus Skills

• Experience with NVIDIA’s robotic software stack (Open X-Embodiment, DROID, AgiBot World, EgoDex, or similar).

• Familiarity with the modern perception toolbox as a user: segmentation (SAM-family), monocular depth, hand/body pose estimation (MANO/SMPL), 6-DoF object pose tracking, point tracking—you don't need to train these models, but you should be comfortable composing and evaluating them in a pipeline

• Familiarity with distributed data processing systems (Ray, Apache Spark) for cluster computing.

• Background in generating or utilizing synthetic robotic data via simulation (Omniverse, MuJoCo).

• Experience integrating spatial awareness or tactile data representations (e.g., Fourier encoding) into visual pipelines.

Persona AI is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.