Lead Principal Applied Scientist - Robotics

Summary

Job Description

The IC5 Applied Scientist for Robotics, Perception, and Embodied AI will serve as a senior technical leader responsible for defining, prototyping, and delivering AI capabilities for commercially viable robotic systems. This role partners across science, software engineering, product, and hardware teams to identify high-impact opportunities, translate ambiguous product needs into research and engineering roadmaps, and guide end-to-end solution development from data collection and experimentation through production deployment. The scientist will lead applied research in multi-sensor fusion, real-time signals, perception, multimodal reasoning,

reinforcement learning, and action-conditioned planning, with a strong bias for hands-on execution and full-stack delivery.

Responsibilities

Key Responsibilities

Solution Identification and Strategy

+ Partner with science, engineering, product, and hardware leaders to identify strategic product needs where robotics, perception, and embodied AI can create measurable customer and business impact.

+ Evaluate academic literature, industry benchmarks, robotics platforms, and commercially viable robot APIs to assess feasibility, technical difficulty, and delivery risks.

+ Break down ambiguous robotics and AI problems into clear research plans, model architectures, data requirements, evaluation criteria, and production milestones.

+ Set science quality standards for applied robotics workstreams, including perception accuracy, latency, robustness, safety, reliability, and operational feedback metrics.

+ Prioritize solutions using the scientific process, including modeling approaches, evaluation techniques, data collection strategies, and risk/reward tradeoffs.

Applied Research and Model Development

+ Lead the design and execution of research programs and POCs for sensors, multi-sensor fusion, real-time signal processing, and perception systems.

+ Develop and guide approaches for object detection, tracking, activity recognition, scene understanding, and related perception capabilities in real-world environments.

+ Advance multimodal AI systems that combine signals such as camera, depth, lidar, audio, telemetry, proprioception, and task context.

+ Apply reinforcement learning, action-conditioned planning, decision-making, and reasoning methods to enable robot behaviors that are robust, measurable, and product-relevant.

+ Define dataset strategy, data quality criteria, labeling approaches, simulation or synthetic data opportunities, and evaluation protocols for robotics and embodied AI use cases.

+ Guide model training, fine-tuning, optimization, inference design, and compute/latency tradeoffs for real-time or near-real-time deployment scenarios.

Solution Delivery and Production Integration

+ Lead full-stack execution across experimentation, data pipelines, model development, evaluation, deployment integration, and production monitoring.

+ Partner closely with software engineering, machine learning engineering, hardware teams, and product stakeholders to integrate AI capabilities into robotic systems and services.

+ Evaluate and review high-complexity code, establish best practices for repositories, version control, code review, documentation, testing, and delivery readiness.

+ Define operational metrics and user feedback loops to assess delivered solutions in production and inform future technical strategy.

+ Serve as an escalation point for complex robotics, AI, perception, and systems integration issues, driving root-cause analysis and durable solutions.

Research Leadership and Influence

+ Demonstrate thought leadership in at least one business-critical area such as robot perception, multimodal systems, sensor fusion, reinforcement learning, or embodied AI.

+ Translate research insights into clear technical recommendations, patents, white papers, design documents, demos, or conference-quality publications where appropriate.

+ Mentor and guide scientists and engineers, raising the bar for applied research rigor, experimentation quality, and production readiness.

+ Establish productive collaborations with internal teams, external research groups, academic partners, or commercial robotics ecosystem partners where relevant.

Core Competencies

+ Bias for action with a strong hands-on orientation; able to move from ambiguous idea to prototype, evaluation, and production path quickly.

+ Ability to execute full-stack AI workflows spanning data, experimentation, modeling, evaluation, APIs, deployment, and feedback loops.

+ Strong cross-functional collaboration with hardware teams, software engineering, ML engineering, product, operations, and leadership stakeholders.

+ Excellent judgment in balancing scientific rigor, product urgency, systems constraints, safety, reliability, and customer impact.

+ Clear executive-level communication; able to explain complex robotics and AI tradeoffs to technical and non-technical audiences.

Required Technical Expertise

+ Deep experience in machine learning, artificial intelligence, computer vision, perception, robotics, sensor fusion, real-time signal processing, or a closely related field.

+ Experience with perception capabilities such as object detection, tracking, activity recognition, scene understanding, localization, or state estimation.

+ Experience designing multimodal AI systems that combine heterogeneous data sources and reason over context, actions, and temporal signals.

+ Practical knowledge of reinforcement learning, planning, sequential decision-making, robotics control interfaces, or action-conditioned model behavior.

+ Strong programming capability in applicable languages such as Python and/or C++, and experience with modern ML frameworks and production-oriented software practices.

+ Familiarity with APIs, SDKs, or integration patterns from commercially viable robotics platforms.

Minimum Qualifications

+ 15 years of experience in data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotics, computer vision, signal processing, statistical modeling, data mining, or a related field; OR

+ Bachelor's degree in Mathematics, Statistics, Computer Science, Data Science, Physics, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field and 11 years of relevant experience; OR

+ Master's degree in one of the above or related fields and 9 years of relevant experience; OR

+ Doctorate in one of the above or related fields and 7 years of relevant experience.

+ 7+ years of hands-on experience with Python, C++, PyTorch, and ROS for software development, machine learning, and robotics applications.

+ Demonstrated technical leadership guiding teams and stakeholders toward strategic goals.

Preferred Qualifications

+ 16 years of experience in data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotics, computer vision, perception, signal processing, or related field; OR equivalent degree-based experience a...