Senior VLA Foundation AI Engineer for Robotic Autonomy

Amazon Science; Zürich; On-site; CHF 110,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

RIVR, an Amazon company, is building Physical AI by deploying autonomous robots for real-world doorstep delivery. We seek an expert to develop Vision-Language-Action models and generalist robot models, advancing autonomy and navigation across real-world tasks.

You will lead a team of engineers, prototype advanced algorithms in Python (PyTorch), and collaborate with RL teams to leverage simulated and real-world data. This role focuses on edge deployment and scalable research leadership.

Qualifications

• Master's degree or higher in Engineering, Robotics, or Machine Learning.
• ≥3 years industry or research experience; PhD applicable.
• Strong DL fundamentals including supervised, self-supervised learning, Transformers, policy optimization, imitation learning, and generative AI techniques (including Diffusion Models).
• Proven experience in developing Vision-Language-Action models or large-scale generalist robot models (e.g., RT-2, Octo).
• Strong robotics background including autonomy, navigation.
• Experience deploying artificial neural networks on hardware.
• Ability to prototype algorithms and train deep neural networks in Python (PyTorch).

Responsibilities

• Develop and implement Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, generalist robot transformers, and imitation learning algorithms to enable robots to autonomously execute complex tasks.
• Design, test, and refine algorithms for real-world autonomy and navigation with focus on spatial reasoning and generalization.
• Streamline data collection and training workflows to expand model capabilities with new tasks and data sources.
• Collaborate with the reinforcement learning team to innovate methods using simulated and real-world data.
• Optimize and distill networks for real-time deployment on edge hardware (e.g., Nvidia Jetson Thor).
• Build, lead and mentor an exceptional team of software engineers.
• Provide expert guidance to product managers and executives for strategic decisions.
• Create and maintain documentation, guidelines, and best practices to streamline knowledge sharing.

Skills

Vision-Language-Action modeling

Imitation learning

Generative AI

Transformer architectures

Autonomy & navigation

Edge deployment

Team leadership

Documentation

Education

Master's degree or higher in Engineering, Robotics, or Machine Learning

PhD experience applicable

Tools

Python

PyTorch

C++

Job description

RIVR, an Amazon company, is building Physical AI by deploying autonomous robots for real-world doorstep delivery. We seek an expert to develop Vision-Language-Action models and generalist robot models, advancing autonomy and navigation across real-world tasks.

You will lead a team of engineers, prototype advanced algorithms in Python (PyTorch), and collaborate with RL teams to leverage simulated and real-world data. This role focuses on edge deployment and scalable research leadership.