Staff AI/ML Engineer- Spot Autonomy

Boston Dynamics; Waltham (MA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading robotics company is seeking a Staff AI/ML Engineer for the Spot Autonomy Team. This role involves developing advanced autonomy capabilities for robots, leveraging machine learning and collaboration with skilled researchers. Ideal candidates will hold a Master's or higher in relevant fields and have significant industry experience in AI/ML applications.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of professional experience with a Master's or 5+ years with a Bachelor's.
• First-hand experience in Machine Learning for visual perception.
• Experienced in writing performant code in Python and C++.

Responsibilities

• Develop autonomy capabilities and deliver them to product.
• Apply ML approaches to solve visual perception challenges.
• Collaborate with researchers and engineers on autonomy projects.

Skills

Machine Learning

Visual Perception

Robot Navigation

Collaboration

Quality Assurance

Education

Masters degree in Computer Science, Robotics or related field

PhD in Computer Science, Robotics or related field

Tools

PyTorch

Job description

As a Staff AI/ML Engineer on the Spot Autonomy Team, you will have the opportunity to develop Spot's next generation autonomy capabilities. You will research, develop and integrate state-of-the-art AI/ML approaches to tackle challenging problems in the areas of robot perception and autonomous navigation. Your work will enable Spot to navigate, understand, and interact with diverse environments at scale.

You will get to:

• Contribute to the development of Spot's next generation perception and autonomy capabilities and deliver them to product
• Develop & apply novel ML-based approaches to solve a variety of challenging real-world problems in the domain of visual perception and semantically-aware autonomous navigation in large scale environments
• Help shape the direction of the team's ML model architectures, datasets, data generation and simulation tools
• Write high quality and performant C++ and Python code

As a part of the Spot Autonomy Team, you will closely collaborate with other skilled researchers & engineers who are passionate about Spot's autonomy capabilities. Being embedded in the broader Spot R&D team, you will get a chance to further collaborate with other groups and experts from a wide variety of backgrounds.

To succeed in this role, you should have the following skills and experience

Required:

• A Masters degree in Computer Science, Robotics or related field and 3+ years of professional experience or a Bachelor's degree with 5+ years of experience.
• First-hand experience in Machine Learning and data driven approaches to visual perception and autonomy problems. A good understanding of recent ML approaches such as LLMs & ViTs.
• Experience with Machine Learning frameworks (e.g. PyTorch) and model development, including training, tuning and optimization.
• A solid baseline understanding of traditional perception, robotics and navigation methods (e.g. SLAM, planning) and their typical strengths & shortcomings
• Experienced in writing performant, well-structured, and testable code (Python and C++)
• Be a team player and good communicator, able to work well in a dynamic and collaborative environment
• Have a passion for quality and autonomous robots

Preferred:

• A PhD in Computer Science, Robotics or related field.
• Previous experience in ML-based semantic perception / robot autonomy
• Previous experience with end-to-end autonomy approaches
• A track record of relevant publications or product deliverables