Physical AI R&D Engineer

Navflex Inc; Broomfield (CO); On-site; USD 115,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

Paid time off

Paid sick leave

Job summary

Navflex is hiring a researcher-engineer to advance Spatial AI on autonomous mobile robots in Colorado. You’ll take promising perception methods from literature to on-vehicle production, optimizing 3D scene understanding and state estimation with LiDAR, cameras, and radar data.

Working with a cross-disciplinary team, you’ll define evaluation standards, build robust baselines, and ensure production-ready implementation aligned with a product roadmap.

Qualifications

• MS or higher in Computer Science, Robotics, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• Experience contributing to a research project or thesis with presenting and defending results.
• Stays current with recent literature relevant to your focus area.

Responsibilities

• Take promising methods from the literature through prototype to validated on-vehicle capability, then partner with core software engineering to turn a proof of concept into production code.
• Train, evaluate, and iterate on models using real fleet data: logs, rosbags, and multi-modal sensor streams from vehicles in production.
• Build and maintain the 3D representation the rest of the stack consumes, with the calibration and sensor health monitoring it depends on.
• Contribute to baselines and evaluation methodology, applying and refining standards set by the team.
• Work with core software and test engineering on annotation pipelines, data infrastructure, and simulation tooling.

Skills

Python

C++

ROS

ROS 2

PyTorch

CUDA

TensorRT

ML research

English

Education

MS or higher in Computer Science/Robotics/Computer Engineering/Electrical Engineering

Tools

ROS

ROS 2

CUDA

Gazebo

Isaac Sim

MuJoCo

Job description

About Navflex

At Navflex, we're pioneering the future of logistics automation through cutting‑edge AI and robotics. Our autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) are transforming the way goods are loaded and unloaded, enabling plug‑and‑play solutions that streamline operations and enhance efficiency across the global supply chain for some of the world’s most demanding warehouse environments. Our international, cross‑disciplinary team in the EU and USA pairs robust mechatronics with cutting‑edge navigation and perception to deliver safe, reliable autonomy in real‑world warehouses and yards. Join us in shaping the future of intelligent logistics.

The Role

Our objective is autonomy in unstructured, real‑world environments: vehicles that build a rich spatial understanding of their surroundings, reason about how they'll change, and act decisively within them. Progress compounds: fleet data becomes the substrate for world modeling and simulation, which lets us validate new behaviors faster than physical testing alone.

You’ll work on problems where evaluation methodology is still evolving, and you’ll contribute to shaping it alongside senior team members. We expect you to track the literature, judge what is ready for real hardware, carry results from prototype to validated capability, and work with core software engineering to bring it into production behind clear requirements and acceptance criteria. Staying current is part of the job, not something you do on your own time.

This is research and development, not research alone. We work on open problems, but always against a product roadmap, and a result counts when it reaches a vehicle and changes something a customer experiences. We move quickly, and nobody here disappears into a lab.

Focus Area: Spatial AI

Perception already runs on our vehicles across LiDAR, depth cameras, inertial sensing, and wheel odometry. You'll deepen its understanding: improve the accuracy and robustness of today's models, harden them against the conditions that degrade performance, and decide what should replace them.

The larger goal is a probabilistic 3D representation of the vehicle's surroundings that holds up over time: persisting through occlusion, decaying honestly when the world may have changed since it was last seen, and carrying calibrated uncertainty the rest of the stack can rely on. Warehouses are dynamic: pallets, people, and other vehicles move while unobserved. How it's encoded is an open question you'll help answer.

The same work extends into state estimation, where learned components complement the classical stack our autonomy team maintains: visual odometry, degeneracy prediction in geometrically weak environments, and pose uncertainty that's trustworthy rather than optimistic.

Success Measures

• Models you build run on production vehicles, with field behavior backed by evaluation developed in partnership with the team, with your own contributions clearly reflected in the results
• Capabilities you prototype reach production because you contribute clear, well‑documented work that the team can build against
• You help evaluate external methods and contribute to team discussions on what's worth pursuing

What You’ll Do

• Take promising methods from the literature through prototype to validated on‑vehicle capability, then partner with core software engineering to turn a proof of concept into production code
• Train, evaluate, and iterate on models using real fleet data: logs, rosbags, and multi‑modal sensor streams from vehicles in production
• Build and maintain the 3D representation the rest of the stack consumes, with the calibration and sensor health monitoring it depends on
• Contribute to baselines and evaluation methodology, applying and refining standards set by the team
• Work with core software and test engineering on annotation pipelines, data infrastructure, and simulation tooling

What You’ll Bring

• MS or higher in Computer Science, Robotics, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field
• You've contributed meaningfully to a research project or thesis, with exposure to presenting and defending results
• You stay current with recent literature relevant to your area of focus.
• Willingness to seek guidance from senior team members on production-readiness decisions.
• Strong Python with modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch, plus working C++ or the clear ability to develop in it
• Experience training and evaluating models on real sensor data, not public benchmarks alone, across modalities such as camera, LiDAR, radar, depth, or inertial
• Professional fluency in English

Preferred

• Depth and current familiarity in one or more of:
  • 3D scene representation: occupancy, scene graphs, or neural and splat‑based reconstruction
  • Segmentation, detection, or other perception on real sensor data, including vision foundation model adaptation
  • Multi‑modal fusion across camera, LiDAR, radar, depth, or inertial data
  • SLAM, visual odometry, or geometric computer vision
  • Uncertainty quantification and calibrated probabilistic modeling
• Research you took onto physical hardware, from a lab platform to a production system
• Experience with ROS and ROS 2
• GPU deployment and inference optimization, for example CUDA or TensorRT
• Simulation, synthetic data, or digital twins, for example Gazebo, Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, MuJoCo, or NVIDIA Cosmos, plus sim-to‑real practices

Compensation And Benefits

The base salary range for this role is $115,000 - $140,000 depending on experience, technical background, and demonstrated qualifications relevant to this position. This range reflects the expected base compensation for this role in Colorado; final offers are determined based on the selected candidate's specific experience and skills.

In addition to base salary, this role is eligible for:

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Paid time off
• Paid sick leave in accordance with applicable law

Application Deadline

This posting will remain open until filled.

Navflex is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other status protected by applicable law.