Staff Robotics Software Engineer, Object Perception

About the Role

We are looking for a Staff Robotics Software Engineer to join our Skills team, focusing on object perception for robot manipulation. This technical leadership role is deeply rooted in production robotics, where reliability, performance, and system behavior matter most. You will focus on integrating, adapting, and operationalizing perception systems within a full robotic stack, ensuring they perform robustly on real hardware in real environments.

In this high-impact role, you will act as a key decision-maker within the perception and skills stack, helping define system architecture, design principles, and technical direction across how perception connects to planning, control, and execution. You will shape how these systems come together end-to-end, influencing both current execution performance and the long-term scalability of the platform.

You will also work closely with AI/ML teams, evaluating and incorporating both learned and classical approaches, while driving the engineering decisions that turn models and algorithms into reliable, production-grade robot behavior.

About the Work

• Own object perception performance on the robot, from sensors through runtime behavior integration
• Lead the design, implementation, and deployment of perception pipelines for manipulation, including object pose estimation, depth reasoning, and scene understanding
• Work hands-on with real robots to debug, tune, and harden perception systems under real-world variability
• Collaborate with AI/ML teams to evaluate, integrate, train, and fine-tune perception models
• Explore and integrate off-the-shelf perception solutions and libraries where they meet performance and reliability needs
• Combine learned models with classical CV, geometry, and task structure to meet system-level requirements
• Define interfaces and contracts between perception, behaviors, and task planning to ensure reliable execution
• Build tools and workflows to evaluate perception performance across datasets, simulation, and hardware
• Help set technical direction and best practices for building robust, production-grade perception systems that are reliable, debuggable, and scalable in real-world robotic environments

About You

• B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. in Robotics, Computer Science, or a related engineering field
• 8+ years of professional experience building object perception systems for real robotic platforms
• Demonstrated experience as a tech lead or senior technical owner for complex robotics projects
• Experience working across learned models and classical perception approaches
• Experience training, fine-tuning, and evaluating perception models
• Strong experience writing production-quality C++ and Python code
• Hands-on experience with monocular vision, stereo vision, RGB-D sensing, or depth reconstruction
• Experience with perception libraries (OpenCV, Open3D, PCL, ROS perception, NumPy, scikit-image)
• You love solving hard perception problems, but your real passion is seeing those solutions work on a robot in the real world and having an impact
• You’re excited to work on hardware
• You enjoy debugging, testing, and iterating quickly in simulation and on the real robot

You Might Also Have

• Solid understanding of spatial reasoning 
• Demonstrated ability to apply object perception model outputs (detection, segmentation, pose estimation) in manipulation pipelines
• Experience with structured 3D estimation (plane fitting, normal estimation, voxel maps, etc)

This a hybrid position based out of one of our Salem, Pittsburgh, or Fremont offices.

The final salary offered to a successful candidate will be dependent on several factors that may include but are not limited to: market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. This range may change based on geographical location and may be modified in the future.