AI Research Engineer: Vision AI / VLM / Physical AI

Role Description

Are you pushing the frontier of computer vision, multimodal large models, and embodied/physical AI—and have the publications to show it? Join us to translate cutting-edge research into production systems that perceive, reason, and act in the real world.

We are building state-of-the-art Vision AI across 2D/3D perception, egocentric/360° understanding, and multimodal reasoning. As an AI Research Engineer, you will own high-leverage experiments from paper → prototype → deployable module in our platform.

You could be part of:

• Computer Vision team: Dive into the world of 3D reconstruction, scene understanding, and visual AI. Explore innovative techniques to transform real-world spaces into immersive 3D models and work with cutting-edge architectures like VGG-T.
• Physical AI Robotics team: Work at the intersection of simulation, robotics, and AI. Leverage NVIDIA’s Omniverse for advanced 3D simulation and collaboration, Isaac Sim for robotics training and testing, and GR00T for foundation models in robotics.

What You’ll Do:

• Advance Visual Perception: Build and fine-tune models for detection, tracking, segmentation (2D/3D), pose & activity recognition, and scene understanding (incl. 360° and multi-view).
• Multimodal Reasoning with VLMs: Train/evaluate vision–language models (VLMs) for grounding, dense captioning, temporal QA, and tool use; design retrieval-augmented and agentic loops for perception-action tasks.
• Physical AI & Embodiment: Prototype perception-in-the-loop policies that close the gap from pixels to actions (simulation + real data).
• Data & Evaluation at Scale: Curate datasets, author high-signal evaluation protocols/KPIs, and run ablations that make results irreproducible impossible.
• Systems & Deployment: Package research into reliable services on a modern stack (Kubernetes, Docker, Ray, FastAPI), with profiling, telemetry, and CI for reproducible science.
• Agentic Workflows: Orchestrate multi-agent pipelines that combine perception, reasoning, simulation, and code generation to self-check and self-correct.

Example Problems You Might Tackle:

• Long horizon video understanding (events, activities, causality) from egocentric or 360° video.
• 3D scene grounding: linking language queries to objects, affordances, and trajectories.
• Fast, privacy preserving perception for on-device or edge inference.
• Robust multi-modal evaluation: temporal consistency, open-set detection, uncertainty.
• Vision conditioned-policy evaluation in sim (Isaac/MuJoCo) with sim2real stress tests.

Qualifications

• Masters/Ph.D in CS/EE/Robotics (or related), actively publishing in CV/ML/Robotics (e.g., CVPR/ICCV/ECCV, NeurIPS/ICML/ICLR, CoRL/RSS).
• Strong PyTorch (or JAX) and Python; comfort with CUDA profiling and mixed precision training.
• Demonstrated research in computer vision and at least one of: VLMs, embodied/physical AI, 3D perception.
• Proven ability to move from paper → code → ablation → result with rigorous experiment tracking.

Requirements

• Experience with video models (e.g., TimeSFormer/MViT/VideoMAE), diffusion or 3D GS/NeRF pipelines, or SLAM/scene reconstruction.
• Prior work on multimodal grounding (referring expressions, spatial language, affordances) or temporal reasoning.
• Familiarity with ROS2, DeepStream/TAO, or edge inference optimizations (TensorRT, ONNX).
• Scalable training: Ray, distributed data loaders, sharded checkpoints.
• Strong software craft: testing, linting, profiling, containers, and reproducibility.
• Public code artifacts (GitHub) and first-author publications or strong open source impact.

Benefits

• Your research ships—powering core features in our MVPs and products.
• Work closely with our Principal Architect and senior engineers/researchers.
• Balance top-tier research practices with pragmatic product focus.
• Salary: $90K Annually.

Company Description

Centific is a frontier AI data foundry that curates diverse, high-quality data, using our purpose-built technology platforms to empower the Magnificent Seven and our enterprise clients with safe, scalable AI deployment.

Our mission is to bridge the gap between AI creators and industry leaders by bringing best practices in GenAI to unicorn innovators and enterprise customers.