Team Lead Physical AI (f/m/d)

CS Caritas Socialis GmbH; Zürich; Hybrid; CHF 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible hours

Hybrid work model

Relocation support

Pension contributions

Mobility credit CHF 500

Job summary

CS Caritas Socialis GmbH is hiring a Team Lead Physical AI to guide a team turning human demonstrations into reliable manipulation skills on our humanoid platform. You will own the path from demonstrations to deployed policies and validate them in real robots and customer environments.

This leadership role combines people management with hands-on technical work across imitation learning, visuomotor policies, and deployment, while shaping the team roadmap and partnerships.

Qualifications

• PhD, MSc, or equivalent industry experience in ML.
• 2+ years managing or leading a team (hiring, roadmapping, mentoring).
• Experience training and deploying ML models with Python and PyTorch.
• Experience managing and scaling datasets.
• Track record translating research into working systems (papers + shipped product/demo).
• Experience operating in a fast-paced startup-like environment within a larger org.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead a high-performing team.
• Develop and oversee visuomotor policies and experiments.
• Set evaluation standards with robust go/no-go decisions.
• Establish regression testing to ensure measurable improvements.
• Ship models into production with cross-functional teams.
• Collaborate with Product, MLOps, Controls, and Hardware partners.

Skills

ML research

Team leadership

ML deployment

Python

PyTorch

Data management

Research to production

Startup environment

Education

PhD / MSc in ML or related

Job description

We're hiring a Team Lead Physical AI to lead a team that turns human demonstrations into reliable manipulation skills on our humanoid platform. You will own the path from teleoperated demonstration to deployed policy: how we collect data, what we train on it, and how we prove it works on real robots in real customer environments.

This is a leadership role with a hands-on core. You will hire, mentor, and manage the team and own its roadmap, while staying technically involved across our imitation learning stack.

Your Mission

• Build and lead a high-performing team — recruit, mentor, and grow a team of ML engineers and researchers. Set a culture of rapid experimentation with rigorous evaluation, and keep the team's roadmap honest about what is research and what is delivery.
• Lead the technical development of visuomotor policies — build the technical roadmap, prioritize directions for improvement, review experiments and code, unblock the team, and take on the hard problems yourself.
• Set the bar for evaluation — build real-robot and simulation evaluation protocols with enough statistical rigor to support go/no-go decisions.
• Establish regression testing so improvements are measurable and failures are diagnosable.
• Ship models into production — work closely with the Product, MLOps, Controls, and Hardware teams to deploy policies on our robots in challenging customer environments, and to close the loop on failures observed in the field.
• Leverage and build partnerships — co-engineer with strategic partners to accelerate development and stay at the frontier. Help build new strategic partnerships and academic collaborations.

Your Skillset

Must-have

• Deep, hands-on expertise with ML research and development (PhD, MSc, or equivalent industry experience)
  2+ years experience managing or technically leading a team (hiring, roadmapping, mentoring), with the appetite to keep doing both people and technical work
• Professional experience training and deploying ML models, with strong Python and deep learning framework skills (PyTorch)
• Practical experience managing and scaling datasets
• Track record of translating research into working systems (papers + shipped product/demo)
• Comfort operating in a fast-paced startup-like environment inside a larger organization

Strong advantage

• Experience with imitation learning and/or reinforcement learning for robotic manipulation
• Experience with robotic manipulation on humanoid, bimanual, or mobile manipulation platforms
• Experience with teleoperation systems and the tooling around them
• Familiarity with diffusion and flow-matching policies, action chunking, and modern VLA architectures
• Distributed training at scale and mature experiment tracking practice
• Publications or visible contributions in imitation learning, embodied AI, or robot learning

What You’ll Get

• Flexible working hours and a hybrid model for real work-life balance
• CHF 500 mobility credit for sustainable commuting
• Bonus system & strong pension contributions
• Tailored training & development opportunities
• Relocation support for a smooth start
• Discounts on health, mobility & entertainment
• Team events and a flat hierarchy where your voice counts
• A warm, international culture built on respect and collaboration

We're hiring a Team Lead Physical AI to lead a team that turns human demonstrations into reliable manipulation skills on our humanoid platform. You will own the path from teleoperated demonstration to deployed policy: how we collect data, what we train on it, and how we prove it works on real robots in real customer environments.

This is a leadership role with a hands-on core. You will hire, mentor, and manage the team and own its roadmap, while staying technically involved across our imitation learning stack.

Your Mission

• Build and lead a high-performing team — recruit, mentor, and grow a team of ML engineers and researchers. Set a culture of rapid experimentation with rigorous evaluation, and keep the team's roadmap honest about what is research and what is delivery.
• Lead the technical development of visuomotor policies — build the technical roadmap, prioritize directions for improvement, review experiments and code, unblock the team, and take on the hard problems yourself.
• Set the bar for evaluation — build real-robot and simulation evaluation protocols with enough statistical rigor to support go/no-go decisions.
• Establish regression testing so improvements are measurable and failures are diagnosable.
• Ship models into production — work closely with the Product, MLOps, Controls, and Hardware teams to deploy policies on our robots in challenging customer environments, and to close the loop on failures observed in the field.
• Leverage and build partnerships — co-engineer with strategic partners to accelerate development and stay at the frontier. Help build new strategic partnerships and academic collaborations.

Your Skillset

Must-have

• Deep, hands-on expertise with ML research and development (PhD, MSc, or equivalent industry experience)
  2+ years experience managing or technically leading a team (hiring, roadmapping, mentoring), with the appetite to keep doing both people and technical work
• Professional experience training and deploying ML models, with strong Python and deep learning framework skills (PyTorch)
• Practical experience managing and scaling datasets
• Track record of translating research into working systems (papers + shipped product/demo)
• Comfort operating in a fast-paced startup-like environment inside a larger organization

Strong advantage

• Experience with imitation learning and/or reinforcement learning for robotic manipulation
• Experience with robotic manipulation on humanoid, bimanual, or mobile manipulation platforms
• Experience with teleoperation systems and the tooling around them
• Familiarity with diffusion and flow-matching policies, action chunking, and modern VLA architectures
• Distributed training at scale and mature experiment tracking practice
• Publications or visible contributions in imitation learning, embodied AI, or robot learning

What You’ll Get

• Flexible working hours and a hybrid model for real work-life balance
• CHF 500 mobility credit for sustainable commuting
• Bonus system & strong pension contributions
• Tailored training & development opportunities
• Relocation support for a smooth start
• Discounts on health, mobility & entertainment
• Team events and a flat hierarchy where your voice counts
• A warm, international culture built on respect and collaboration