Machine Learning Engineer

Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Perception R&D Boston, MA (Hybrid)

Our client, a fast-growing and well-funded robotics company, is looking for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Perception R&D) to help push the boundaries of robotic perception in real-world warehouse environments.

This is an opportunity to work at the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and foundation models, solving some of the hardest problems in automation. You will be focused on enabling robots to understand and manipulate complex, unpredictable environments by leveraging Vision-Language Models, Generative AI, and large-scale foundation models.

The team is tackling the “long tail” of real-world perception problems such as novel packaging, damaged goods, occlusions, and challenging lighting conditions, and translating cutting-edge research into robust systems deployed on real robots operating at scale.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Develop ML strategies to detect and handle rare or unexpected events in robotic perception pipelines
• Adapt and fine-tune foundation models and vision-language models for robotic manipulation tasks
• Build systems capable of zero-shot or few-shot generalization in real-world warehouse environments
• Distill large, compute-heavy models into efficient, low-latency networks for edge deployment (NVIDIA Orin)
• Translate academic breakthroughs in computer vision and machine learning into production-ready robotics systems
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to technical direction within the perception and ML team

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years of experience in computer vision and deep learning, ideally in applied research or advanced R&D
• Strong experience with modern ML architectures including Transformers (ViT), self-supervised learning, VLMs, or zero-shot detection
• Expert-level Python and PyTorch skills
• Experience tackling difficult perception challenges such as occlusions, reflective surfaces, and variable lighting
• Experience with model distillation, quantization, or deploying ML models to edge hardware
• Ability to communicate complex AI research concepts to engineering and product stakeholders
• Familiarity with Docker, AWS/GCP, experiment tracking tools, and modern ML infrastructure

Why This Role?

You’ll be joining a company building real-world robotic systems deployed in logistics environments, where the impact of your work will be immediate and tangible. The team is focused on shipping production systems that combine AI, robotics, and machine learning to automate physically demanding warehouse tasks.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary range: Up to $200k
• Equity in a high-growth robotics company
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• 401k with employer contribution
• Unlimited vacation
• Opportunity to work on cutting-edge robotics systems deployed in the real world