Senior Staff AI Software Engineer, Perception

Role overview A commercial humanoid robotics company is hiring a Senior Staff AI Software Engineer to own the technical vision and system architecture for perception on its bipedal robot. As the platform expands from structured work cells into open, dynamic spaces, perception must reliably interpret people, forklifts, and other moving objects in real time. The role carries architectural authority across sensing modalities, model design, redundancy, and compute budgets, and serves as a senior mentor and external representative for the perception stack.

Responsibilities - Define the technical vision and system architecture for perception, specifying how the robot perceives and reasons about humans and hazards in dynamic environments. - Analyze tradeoffs across sensing modalities, model design, redundancy, and compute budget, balancing safety, latency, and real-world robustness. - Stay hands-on to prototype, validate, or directly build critical components. - Partner with functional safety and systems engineering to shape the safety case strategy and the supporting evidence required. - Contribute to failure mode and hazard analysis at the system level, identifying risks the design must address. - Evaluate emerging research and decide which advances belong in future robot architectures. - Set standards for verification and validation of ML-based perception, especially for rare and safety-critical scenarios. - Collaborate across navigation, controls, and hardware so the perception architecture serves the full robot. - Mentor engineers and technical leads, and represent the architecture to executive leadership, partners, and customers.

Requirements - Eight or more years of experience in machine learning or perception for robotics, with a track record of defining system architecture. - Master's or PhD in Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Computer Science, or a related field, with deep foundations in machine learning, robotics, and intelligent systems. - Demonstrated experience architecting ML or perception systems for safety-critical contexts such as human detection, functional safety, automotive, robotics, or comparable regulated domains. - Deep expertise in deep convolutional neural networks, multi-object tracking, data association, supervised learning, and pose estimation, with intuition for where these approaches break down. - Experience making system-level tradeoffs across sensing modalities, redundancy, and compute constraints on embedded or real-time hardware. - A track record of setting technical direction at an organizational level; publications at venues such as CVPR, ICCV, RSS, or ICRA are a plus.

Nice to have - Direct experience supporting a safety case or certification submission. - Background architecting redundant or diverse sensing systems for safety-rated perception. - Experience with perception systems for humanoid or legged robots. - History of representing technical architecture to regulators, third-party certifiers, or safety auditors. - Substantial experience with FMEA, hazard analysis, and safety case strategy for autonomous or robotic systems.

Benefits and work setup - Fully remote within the U.S., with hybrid flexibility near offices in Salem, OR, Pittsburgh, PA, or Fremont, CA. - Anticipated base salary range of $238,000 to $372,000 USD, plus eligibility for an annual discretionary bonus. - Benefits include 401(k) with company match, equity, fully company-paid medical/dental/vision and disability coverage, EAP, parental leave, tuition reimbursement, and unlimited PTO for exempt staff with twelve paid holidays.