AI Research and Development Engineer (Physical AI)

About This Role

• Scaling foundation models to the physical world is one of the hardest challenges in AI today.
• This role moves beyond simulation, which puts intelligence directly onto real hardware.
• You'll build the end-to-end stack for robotic intelligence as part of the Intel's Open Edge Platform and OpenVINO toolkit.
• The work is entirely open-source under the Apache 2.0 license to create the bridge between high-level reasoning and real-time physical action.
• About the Role This role spans the entire lifecycle of physical AI, from training large-scale Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models to building lightweight runtimes for real-time deployment.
• It's a position for engineers who work at the intersection of high-level research and low-level performance optimization.
• You'll ensure that complex policies don't just work in a paper, but run reliably on edge hardware with minimal latency.
• What You'll Do Implement and fine-tune state-of-the-art Vision-Language-Action policies for robotic manipulation and control.
• Export and optimize VLA models for edge deployment without accuracy loss via export pipelines, graph optimization, and precision calibration to ensure policies run at high frequencies on constrained hardware.
• Develop safety runtimes to manage action clamping, velocity limits, and workspace bounds for reliable real-world operation.
• Build and maintain model-agnostic inference APIs that abstract across different robotic platforms and hardware backends.
• Support deployment across a range of edge accelerators and inference runtimes to ensure broad hardware compatibility.
• Write and publish research papers at top-tier venues to contribute to novel findings in vision, physical AI, model optimization, and robotic learning.