Robotics Software Engineer, Vision-Language Reasoning & Behaviors

Job description

[FieldAI](http://www.fieldai.com)’s Irvine team is where embodied AI meets real robots, real sensors, and real field deployments. Based in the heart of Southern California’s robotics ecosystem, we build risk-aware, reliable, field-ready AI systems that solve the hardest problems in robotics and unlock the full potential of embodied intelligence. If you want your work to ship, get tested on hardware, and improve through real deployments, Irvine is the place. We go beyond typical data-driven approaches or pure transformer-only architectures, combining rigorous engineering with learning systems proven in globally deployed solutions that deliver results today and get better every time our robots run in the field. ### What You Will Get To Do - Develop visual reasoning and inspection algorithm and pipeline for real-world deployments. - Build inspection and various robot behaviors as reusable primitives. - Integrate on-edge vision-language inference into the behavior loop under real compute and latency budgets. - Develop the robot's reasoning and judgment legible and integrate it across the mission workflow. ### What You Have - MS in robotics, computer science, aerospace engineering, electrical engineering, or a related field, with 3+ years building software that runs on real robots. - Strong C++ and Python, and hands-on ROS 2 experience designing nodes and systems that ship. - Working knowledge of behavior trees and computer vision. - Experience integrating learned models into a robotics system. ### What Will Set You Apart - Experience with open-vocabulary detection or visual grounding with VLMs on robots. - GPU inference optimization on embedded hardware (TensorRT, quantization, ONNX). - Thermal imaging or anomaly detection against reference imagery. - Deployments on legged platforms in industrial environments.