Robotics Engineer — AI Manipulation & Perception
About the Role
We build AI-first mixed-case palletizing — robots that look at a stream of never-before-seen packages and stack them into pallets and roll-cages, reliably and fast, with no per-box programming.
You'll own this system end to end: from 3D perception and grasping, through cage-aware placement and motion planning, to standing it up on a real KUKA cell on a customer's floor — working directly with the CTO and founding engineers.
Our first deployments are live logistics lines with SF Express — you'll ship them.
This role may require travel to some of the world's most exciting factories — Midea, Mercedes-Benz, SF Express, and others — mostly in southern China.
What You'll Do
- Build the perception stack — 3D structured-light vision, class-agnostic segmentation, and 6-DoF pose estimation for arbitrary boxes, bags, and cartons.
- Design grasp selection and the vacuum end-effector logic that handles rigid, film-wrapped, and deformable packaging.
- Build the placement brain — online 3D bin-packing into pallets and bounded roll-cages, optimizing stability and load density.
- Plan collision-free, time-optimal motion and drive KUKA arms in real time over RSI (250 Hz).
- Deploy on real cells — camera calibration, gripper bring-up, on-site commissioning, fake-parcel validation, and run-in with KUKA and SF.
- Close the loop — record every pick, feed the data flywheel, and continuously improve the models.
What We're Looking For
- Strong Python and C++.
- Hands-on robotic manipulation experience — an industrial arm, a research lab, or systems you built yourself.
- 3D computer vision — point clouds, depth cameras, and pose estimation.
- Motion planning and control fundamentals, and machine learning with PyTorch (segmentation, grasping, or policy learning).
- Fluent with agentic coding tools like Claude Code as part of your daily workflow.
- Proficient English is required; professional Chinese is strongly preferred (our partners and deployment sites are in China).
- You like being hands-on with hardware and on the factory floor.
- Bonus: KUKA or other industrial-robot integration (RSI, KRL, EtherCAT), palletizing / depalletizing / bin-packing, or structured-light 3D cameras (Photoneo, Zivid, Mech-Mind, or KUKA vision).
- Bonus: NVIDIA Isaac Sim, ROS 2, cuRobo / OMPL, LeRobot, imitation learning / VLAs, or NVIDIA Jetson.
- Bonus: you've built multi-agent systems, or have deep experience with agentic coding tools like Claude Code.
Why Join Us
Work directly with the CTO and founding engineers, and own a real product going live with world-class industrial partners — KUKA, Midea, Mercedes Benz, and SF Express. You'll get direct advising from leading faculty at UC Berkeley BAIR and from researchers at Physical Intelligence and other company partners. The team feels like a family: Friday-night events and occasional retreats — racing, beach days, and more (last summer we took the whole team to Hawaii!). There's freedom to explore, with room for open-ended work that aligns your skills with the direction of our research. Full-time, competitive salary plus meaningful equity; we can assist eligible candidates with work-permit arrangements.