Staff Perception Engineer

Senior/Staff AI Perception Engineer (Team Lead)

San Francisco Bay Area, CA · Full-time

About the company

Our client is a venture-backed robotics company building general-purpose mobile manipulator robots for industrial applications - supporting use cases across logistics, retail, and manufacturing environments. Their robots run on a proprietary physical-intelligence software stack designed to generalize across applications without reprogramming. The team is well-funded, growing fast, and has already shipped its robot into live customer sites.

The role

We're hiring a Senior/Staff AI Perception Engineer (Team Lead) to advance a production 3D AI perception stack for industrial robots - covering object localization, pose estimation, scene reconstruction, and deployment on robot compute within tight cycle-time constraints. This is a role for someone who has taken AI perception from prototype through production and real-world operation, and who's comfortable making pragmatic tradeoffs across accuracy, latency, compute, data, and delivery timelines.

The role carries both technical and people leadership for the Perception Team - you'll own the perception roadmap, set technical direction, and grow the team, while staying hands-on in the codebase (roughly a 60/40 split between IC work and leadership).

What you'll do

• Advance perception capabilities end to end - from problem definition and prototyping through deployment, monitoring, and production improvement.
• Develop and improve 3D perception algorithms for object localization, pose estimation, scene reconstruction, and manipulation using RGB-D and other sensing modalities.
• Diagnose and correct production failures caused by difficult scenes, lighting changes, sensor noise, and gaps between training data and real customer environments.
• Strengthen production readiness through better data, evaluation, regression testing, and field-failure analysis.
• Collaborate across robotics teams to integrate perception into planning, manipulation, controls, and system software.
• Lead and grow the Perception Team - own the roadmap, run design reviews, hire, and mentor as the team scales.

What you'll bring

• MS or PhD in Robotics, Computer Vision, Computer Science, or a related field.
• 5+ years developing robotic perception systems, with direct responsibility for deploying perception software in production on physical robots.
• Experience leading a technical team - setting direction, mentoring, running design reviews, owning delivery.
• Strong Python/C++ for real-time perception pipelines, including sensor-data processing and model integration using ROS/ROS2.
• Strong foundation in 3D geometry, camera calibration, RGB-D or point-cloud processing, and 3D object localization/pose estimation.
• Hands-on experience building AI perception models (PyTorch or similar) and deploying under latency/compute constraints on robot hardware.

Nice to have

• Multi-sensor fusion and synchronization across cameras, LiDAR, encoders, or other robot sensors.
• Edge inference optimization (TensorRT, ONNX Runtime, CUDA, quantization).
• Experience with Isaac Sim, synthetic data, or sim-to-real workflows.
• Experience deploying perception systems in warehouse, logistics, or industrial environments.

Compensation

$180K–$280K base, depending on experience, plus equity and benefits.

Interested candidates should reach out confidentially to discuss further - company details will be shared once mutual interest is established.