Lead Principal Applied Scientist - Robotics serves as a senior technical leader within the Robotics, Perception, and Embodied AI team. This role is responsible for defining, prototyping, and delivering advanced AI capabilities for commercially viable robotic systems by translating ambiguous product needs into actionable research and engineering roadmaps. The scientist will lead applied research in multi-sensor fusion, real-time signal processing, perception, multimodal reasoning, reinforcement learning, and action-conditioned planning. Day-to-day responsibilities include developing models for object detection, tracking, and scene understanding while managing full-stack execution across data pipelines and production monitoring. Required technical expertise includes proficiency in Python, C++, PyTorch, and ROS. The role addresses the complex challenge of creating robust, real-time robot behaviors by integrating heterogeneous data sources like lidar, camera, and audio into cohesive, high-performance systems for real-world environments.
Translate ambiguous product requirements into technical roadmaps for robotics, perception, and embodied AI systems.
Lead the design and execution of research programs for multi-sensor fusion and real-time signal processing.
Develop advanced models for object detection, tracking, scene understanding, and multimodal reasoning.
Implement reinforcement learning and action-conditioned planning to create robust robot behaviors.
Define data collection strategies, labeling protocols, and evaluation metrics for production-ready AI models.
Manage the full-stack execution of data pipelines, model training, optimization, and deployment monitoring.
Serve as a technical escalation point for complex issues in robotics systems integration and root-cause analysis.
Mentor engineers and scientists while producing high-quality technical documentation, patents, or publications.
What we're looking for
This position requires a security clearance.
Candidates must have 15 years of experience in data science, machine learning, AI, robotics, or related fields; OR a Bachelor's degree and 11 years of experience; OR a Master's degree and 9 years of experience; OR a Doctorate and 7 years of experience.
Candidates must have at least 7 years of hands-on experience with Python, C++, PyTorch, and ROS for software development and robotics applications.
Experience is required in machine learning, computer vision, perception, sensor fusion, and real-time signal processing.
Experience is required in designing multimodal AI systems and practical knowledge of reinforcement learning or action-conditioned planning.
Candidates must demonstrate technical leadership guiding teams and stakeholders toward strategic goals.
Experience with commercial robot platforms, SDKs/APIs, simulation environments, and real-time deployment constraints (preferred).
5+ years of experience creating technical publications, patents, white papers, or peer-reviewed articles (preferred).
Robotics
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision
Deep Learning
Sensor Fusion
Reinforcement Learning
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Signal Processing
Data Mining
API Integration
Telemetry
Digital Twins
Python
Machine Learning
Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Large Language Models
Data Engineering
OCI
knowledge-graph s
Data Pipelines
Statistical Analysis
Model Evaluation
Experimental Design
Bioinformatics
Genomics