Member of Technical Staff – Robotics and Physical AI

Description

Job Title: MTS – Robotics and Physical AI         

Job Location: San Jose, CA (This position requires a full-time, on-site presence in our San Jose, CA office)

Job ID: AI2523    

Job Description:   

We are seeking an exceptional Member of Technical Staff to join our Robotics and Physical AI team. This role will focus on building vision-based perception, localization, and navigation systems for autonomous mobile robots, drones, and future robotic platforms.

The ideal candidate has deep hands-on experience in computer vision, visual-inertial odometry, visual SLAM, and autonomous navigation. They should be comfortable working across traditional geometric vision methods and modern deep-learning-based approaches, with experience deploying these systems on embedded or edge-compute platforms.

This is a senior individual-contributor role with opportunities to lead technical direction, mentor engineers, and influence the long-term development of our robotics and Physical AI solutions.

Key Responsibilities: 

• Architect and develop vision-based perception, localization, mapping, and navigation systems for AMRs, drones, and other robotic platforms.
• Develop and integrate visual odometry, visual-inertial odometry, visual SLAM, sensor fusion, and 3D scene-understanding pipelines.
• Apply both traditional computer vision and deep-learning techniques for feature extraction, object detection, segmentation, depth estimation, tracking, and obstacle understanding.
• Optimize and deploy computer vision and AI workloads on embedded and edge-compute platforms.
• Collaborate with robotics, hardware, AI, and systems teams to validate solutions in simulation, hardware-in-the-loop environments, and real-world deployments.
• Provide technical leadership, mentor engineers, and contribute to the long-term vision for robotics and Physical AI. 

Required Qualifications: 

• Master’s or Ph.D. in Robotics, Computer Vision, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of experience developing perception, localization, or navigation systems for autonomous robots.
• Strong proficiency in C++, Python, and ROS or ROS 2.
• Deep experience with visual odometry, visual-inertial odometry, visual SLAM, multi-view geometry, camera calibration, and sensor fusion.
• Strong foundation in traditional computer vision, including feature detection and matching, optical flow, epipolar geometry, pose estimation, triangulation, and bundle adjustment.
• Experience with deep-learning-based computer vision, including object detection, semantic or instance segmentation, depth estimation, tracking, or scene understanding.
• Hands-on experience with frameworks such as OpenCV, PyTorch, TensorFlow, or equivalent tools.
• Experience deploying vision and AI workloads on embedded Linux or edge-compute platforms.
• Strong systems integration, debugging, performance optimization, and real-world deployment experience. 

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Experience with one of drone navigation, AMRs, or other GPS-denied autonomous systems.
• Experience with stereo vision, monocular depth, dense mapping, neural reconstruction, occupancy estimation, or BEV-based perception.
• Familiarity with transformers, vision-language models, diffusion models, world models, or vision-language-action systems.
• Experience with simulation and testing platforms such as Gazebo, Isaac Sim or others.
• Demonstrated innovation through patents, publications, or deployed commercial systems.

Personal attributes:     

Can-do attitude. Strong team player. Curious, creative and good at solving problems. Execution and results-oriented. Self-driven, Thinks Big and is highly accountable. Good communication skills.

The annual salary for this position ranges from $176,200 - $281,900. The actual annual salary offered will depend on several factors, including - among others - job-related skills, experience, technical expertise, qualifications, work location, and business needs. The annual salary range for this position is subject to change and may be adjusted in the future.

In addition to base salary, this role is also eligible for private company equity, and a comprehensive package of employee benefits. Please note that the salary ranges listed for U.S. roles reflect base salary only and do not include equity or other forms of compensation. 

EEO Employer: SiMa is an equal opportunity employer; all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, Veteran status, or any other protected classification.