Senior AI Engineer - VLA Foundation Model

Description

Amazon RIVR, an ETH Zurich spin-off acquired by Amazon, is building the next generation of safe, reliable autonomous robots for last-mile delivery.

In this role, you will develop multi-modal Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models to enable robots to autonomously generate actions from demonstrations, real-time sensor data, and natural language commands.

Responsibilities

• Develop and implement cutting-edge Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, generalist robot transformers, and imitation learning algorithms (e.g., diffusion policies) to enable robots to autonomously execute complex tasks.
• Design, test, and refine your algorithms to meet the demands of complex real-world autonomy and navigation tasks, with a focus on spatial reasoning and generalization.
• Streamline the data collection and training workflow to efficiently expand model capabilities with new tasks and data sources.
• Collaborate with the reinforcement learning team to innovate methods that leverage both simulated and real-world data.
• Optimize and distill networks for real-time deployment on the edge (e.g. Nvidia Jetson Thor).
• Build, lead and mentor an exceptional team of software engineers.
• Provide expert guidance to product managers and executives for strategic decision-making.
• Create and maintain documentation, guidelines, and best practices to streamline knowledge sharing.

Qualifications

• Master’s degree or higher in a relevant field such as Engineering, Robotics, or Machine Learning.
• A minimum of three years of industry or research experience, with PhD experience applicable.
• Strong deep learning fundamentals including supervised learning, self-supervised learning, Transformer-based architectures, policy optimization algorithms, imitation learning, and generative AI techniques (including Diffusion Models).
• Proven experience in developing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models or large-scale generalist robot models (e.g., RT-2, Octo, etc.).
• Strong background in robotics including autonomy, navigation.
• Experience with deploying artificial neural networks on hardware platforms.
• Ability to prototype algorithms and train deep neural networks in Python (Pytorch)
• PhD degree in Robotics, Engineering, Computer Science, Machine Learning or a similar discipline, or an equivalent amount of research experience.
• Publications at top-tier conferences.
• Experience in managing a software team.
• Ability to write production-level code in modern C++