Team Lead Physical AI

4-6 Years

Job Description

Key Responsibilities:

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Technical Leadership & Systems Integration

Lead end-to-end software architecture for mobile robotics platforms — perception, localization/SLAM, navigation, motion control, and safety systems.
Own design decisions around ROS/ROS 2 middleware, sensor fusion pipelines, and modular hardware abstraction layers.
Act as technical lead for fleet-level coordination and communication interfaces (REST, MQTT, CAN).
Set technical direction and coding/architecture standards for the team; review designs and code from other engineers.

Physical AI, VLA/VLM & Perception

Drive integration of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) and Vision-Language Model (VLM) capabilities into the autonomy stack for tasks such as semantic scene understanding, instruction-conditioned navigation, and object/task-level reasoning.
Own the Visual SLAM pipeline (e.g., ORB-SLAM, VINS, RTAB-Map or equivalent) for robust localization and mapping across dynamic, GPS-denied, and visually repetitive warehouse/industrial environments.
Evaluate, fine-tune, and productionize foundation-model-based perception and reasoning components, balancing on-robot compute constraints with model accuracy and latency.
Integrate and validate AI/ML models in production for localization, obstacle detection, and object/pallet identification.

Deployment & Field Reliability

Take direct ownership of resolving deployment challenges encountered during customer site rollouts — environmental edge cases, network/connectivity constraints, sensor degradation, and unexpected operational scenarios.
Drive the verification & validation (V&V) strategy for autonomous robot behavior across simulated and real environments prior to and during deployment.
Design for graceful failure handling and energy-aware shutdown logic to improve field reliability and serviceability.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

Work closely with product managers and hardware teams to translate customer requirements into scalable, field-deployable solutions.
Mentor and grow junior and mid-level engineers; document complex subsystems to support organizational knowledge-sharing.

REQUIRED SKILLS & EXPERIENCE

4-6 years of experience in mobile robotics / autonomous systems software, with demonstrated ownership of production AMR deployments.
Strong hands-on experience with ROS / ROS 2, including middleware architecture and sensor fusion.
Proven experience with Visual SLAM techniques and libraries, and a solid grasp of localization and mapping in real-world, GPS-denied environments.
Working knowledge of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) and/or Vision-Language Model (VLM) approaches, and how to integrate foundation-model-based perception into constrained, real-time robotic systems.
Practical experience with controllers such as PID, Stanley, or Model Predictive Control (MPC) for motion/velocity control.
Demonstrated track record of diagnosing and resolving field/deployment issues in live customer or warehouse environments (not simulation-only experience).
Proficiency in Python and C++ for robotics software development; familiarity with OpenCV, NumPy/SciPy, and standard ROS toolchains.
Experience with fleet-level communication protocols (REST, MQTT, CAN) and hardware-in-the-loop or simulation-based testing frameworks.
Prior experience leading or mentoring a small technical team, or clear readiness to step into a team-lead capacity.

EDUCATION