AI Research Engineer: Vision AI / VLM / Physical AI-1

Centific; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Centific seeks an AI Research Engineer to push the frontier of Vision AI, VLMs, and embodied/physical AI, translating cutting‑edge research into production systems that perceive, reason, and act in the real world.

You will own high‑leverage experiments from paper → prototype → deployable module in our platform, collaborating with the Vision AI and Physical AI Robotics teams to build 3D reconstruction and perception capabilities using state‑of‑the‑art tools such as Omniverse and Isaac Sim.

Qualifications

• Masters/Ph.D in CS/EE/Robotics with active publications in CV/ML/Robotics.
• Strong PyTorch and Python; familiarity with CUDA profiling and mixed precision training.
• Proven ability to move from paper to code to reproducible results with rigorous experimentation.
• Experience with 3D perception, VLMs, and embodied/physical AI is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Advance Visual Perception: build and fine‑tune 2D/3D detection, tracking, segmentation, and scene understanding.
• Multimodal Reasoning: train/evaluate VLMs and design retrieval‑augmented and agentic loops.
• Physical AI & Embodiment: prototype perception‑in‑loop policies linking pixels to actions.
• Data & Evaluation at Scale: curate datasets, define KPIs, and run ablations.
• Systems & Deployment: package research into reliable services on Kubernetes, Docker, Ray, FastAPI.
• Agentic Workflows: orchestrate multi‑agent pipelines integrating perception, reasoning, and code generation.

Skills

PyTorch

Python

CV/ML research

Publications in CV/ML/Robotics

Education

Masters/Ph.D in CS/EE/Robotics

Tools

ROS2

TensorRT

ONNX

Omniverse

Job description

About Centific

Centific is a frontier AI data foundry that curates diverse, high-quality data, using our purpose‑built technology platforms to empower the Magnificent Seven and our enterprise clients with safe, scalable AI deployment. Our team includes more than 150 PhDs and data scientists, along with more than 4,000 AI practitioners and engineers. We harness the power of an integrated solution ecosystem—comprising industry‑leading partnerships and 1.8 million vertical domain experts in more than 230 markets—to create contextual, multilingual, pre‑trained datasets; fine‑tuned, industry‑specific LLMs; and RAG pipelines supported by vector databases. Our zero‑distance innovation™ solutions for GenAI can reduce GenAI costs by up to 80% and bring solutions to market 50% faster. Our mission is to bridge the gap between AI creators and industry leaders by bringing best practices in GenAI to unicorn innovators and enterprise customers. We aim to help these organizations unlock significant business value by deploying GenAI at scale, helping to ensure they stay at the front‑line of technological advancement and maintain a competitive edge in their respective markets.

About Job

AI Research Engineer: Vision AI / VLM / Physical AI Company: Centific Location: Seattle, WA (or Remote) Type: Full‑time

Build the Future of Perception & Embodied Intelligence

Are you pushing the frontier of computer vision, multimodal large models, and embodied/physical AI—and have the publications to show it? Join us to translate cutting‑edge research into production systems that perceive, reason, and act in the real world.

The Mission

We are building state of‑t‑heart Vision AI across 2D/3D perception, egocentric/360° understanding, and multimodal reasoning. As an AI Research Engineer, you will own high‑leverage experiments from paper → prototype → deployable module in our platform. We are seeking passionate Engineers to join our cutting‑edge labs, you could be part: Computer Vision team as a Research Engineer and dive into the world of 3D reconstruction, scene understanding, and visual AI. You’ll explore innovative techniques like those used to transform real‑world spaces into immersive 3D models—such as the 3D Reconstruction projects—and work with cutting‑edge architectures like VGG‑T (Visual Geometry Grounded Transformers), known for advancing deep learning in vision tasks. This role is perfect for those excited to develop AI systems that interpret, reconstruct, and interact with the visual world, using state‑of‑the‑art tools and methodologies. Physical AI Robotics team, where you’ll work at the intersection of simulation, robotics, and AI. You’ll leverage NVIDIA’s Omniverse for advanced 3D simulation and collaboration, Isaac Sim for robotics training and testing, and GR00T for foundation models in robotics. Experience with Holoscan SDK for real‑time medical and industrial robotics pipelines, Newton Physics for dynamic simulation, and NVIDIA’s NERD for neural robot dynamics will be a plus. This role is ideal for those eager to push the boundaries of AI‑driven robotics using state‑of‑the‑art tools and frameworks.

What You’ll Do

• Advance Visual Perception: Build and fine‑tune models for detection, tracking, segmentation (2D/3D), pose & activity recognition, and scene understanding (incl. 360° and multi‑view).
• Multimodal Reasoning with VLMs: Train/evaluate vision–language models (VLMs) for grounding, dense captioning, temporal QA, and tooluse; design retrieval‑augmented and agentic loops for perception‑action‑tasks.
• Physical AI & Embodiment: Prototype perception‑in‑the‑loop policies that close the gap from pixels to actions (simulation + real data). Integrate with planners and task graphs for manipulation, navigation, or safety workflows.
• Data & Evaluation at Scale: Curate datasets, author high‑signal evaluation protocols/KPIs, and run ablations that make results irreproducible impossible.
• Systems & Deployment: Package research into reliable services on a modern stack (Kubernetes, Docker, Ray, FastAPI), with profiling, telemetry, and CI for reproducible science.
• Agentic Workflows: Orchestrate multi‑agent pipelines (e.g., ‑LangGraphstyle graphs) that combine perception, reasoning, simulation, and ‑codeg‑generation to ‑self‑check and ‑self‑correct‑.

Example Problems You Might Tackle

• Long horizon‑video understanding (events, activities, causality) from egocentric or 360° video.
• 3D scene grounding: linking language queries to objects, affordances, and trajectories.
• Fast, privacy preserving perception for ‑ondevice‑or edge inference.
• Robust multi‑modal evaluation: temporal consistency, open‑set detection, uncertainty.
• Vision conditioned‑policy evaluation in sim (Isaac/MuJoCo) with sim2real stress tests.

Minimum Qualifications

• Masters/Ph.D in CS/EE/Robotics (or related), actively publishing in CV/ML/Robotics (e.g., CVPR/ICCV/ECCV, NeurIPS/ICML/ICLR, CoRL/RSS).
• Strong PyTorch (or JAX) and Python; comfort with CUDA profiling and mixed precision‑ training.
• Demonstrated research in computer vision and at least one of: VLMs (e.g., LLaVA style, video‑ language‑ models), embodied/physical AI, 3D perception.
• Proven ability to move from paper → code → ablation → result with rigorous experiment tracking.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with video models (e.g., TimeSFormer/MViT/VideoMAE), diffusion or 3D GS/NeRF pipelines, or SLAM/scene reconstruction.
• Prior work on multimodal grounding (referring expressions, spatial language, affordances) or temporal reasoning.
• Familiarity with ROS2, DeepStream/TAO, or edge inference optimizations (TensorRT, ONNX).
• Scalable training: Ray, distributed data loaders, sharded checkpoints.
• Strong software craft: testing, linting, profiling, containers, and reproducibility.
• Public code artifacts (GitHub) and first‑author publications or strong open source‑ impact.

Our Stack

Modeling: PyTorch, torchvision/lightning, Hugging Face, OpenMMLab, xFormers

Perception: YOLO/Detectron/MMDet, SAM/Mask2Former, CLIP‑style backbones, optical flow

VLM / LLM: Vision encoders + LLMs, RAG for video, toolformer‑/agent loops

3D / Sim: Open3D, PyTorch3D, Isaac/MuJoCo, COLMAP/SLAM, NeRF/3DGS

Systems: Python, FastAPI, Ray, Kubernetes, Docker, Triton/TensorRT, Weights & Biases

Pipelines: LangGraph‑like orchestration, data versioning, artifact stores

What Success Looks Like

A publishable or open‑sourced outcome (with company approval) or a production‑ready module that measurably moves a product KPI (latency, accuracy, robustness). Clean, reproducible code with documented ablations and an evaluation report that a teammate can rerun end‑to‑end. A demo that clearly communicates capabilities, limits, and next steps.

Why Centific

Real impact: Your research ships—powering core features in our MVPs and products. Mentorship: Work closely with our Principal Architect and senior engineers/researchers. Velocity + Rigor: We balance top‑tier research practices with pragmatic product focus.

Salary

Salary: $180,000-$240,000 + OTB

Centific is an equal‑opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, age, mental or physical disability, medical condition, sex (including pregnancy), gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital status, familial status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.