Principal AI Lead
Compensation: $250-350k
Location: New York, Seattle, Bay Area (hybrid)
 

This is a compelling opportunity to join a fast-scaling, vertically integrated robotics company at what insiders describe as a genuine inflection point - one of the only fully US-headquartered and US-manufactured robotics businesses operating at this level of ambition.

The company builds intelligent, accessible robots for real-world industrial environments - combining custom hardware, simulation, perception, and learning-based control into a fully integrated stack. A core technical differentiator is their work on demonstration-based learning, enabling robots to acquire new tasks through human demonstration rather than traditional programming, significantly reducing deployment complexity.

The business is growing rapidly: headcount has scaled nearly 4x over the past year, revenue is projected to grow approximately 6x year-on-year, and the company is planning to double in size again over the next 12 months. Leadership carries strong national visibility, with the CEO recently advising the US Congress on AI and robotics policy, and the Head of Software bringing prior leadership experience from a major global technology company.

With Series B funding in place and a Series C on the horizon, the timing for this hire is deliberate. The company is building its AI capability now to be ready for the next stage of scale.
 

This is a high-impact, long-horizon hire supporting one of the company's most critical AI initiatives. One senior engineer is already in place; this role is intended to support and scale that capability - with a clear path to increased leadership responsibility as the team grows.

The focus is on building robotics AI models end-to-end, not just training or deploying existing ones. You will sit at the intersection of robotics, autonomous systems, and modern foundation models - working directly with real robots in an in-office demo and testing environment, moving from research and experimentation through to production deployment.
 

• Build and debug end-to-end robotics AI models spanning perception, decision-making, and control
• Design and implement state-of-the-art ML models and training pipelines - including transformer, autoregressive, and diffusion-based approaches
• Lead rapid experimentation and prototyping of new model architectures, with a focus on performance optimisation and failure mode analysis
• Develop and improve demonstration-based learning and imitation pipelines
• Build robust evaluation and debugging systems including interpretability tools and metrics tracking
• Collaborate with engineering to optimise training infrastructure and move models from simulation to production deployment
• Apply transfer learning and fine-tuning strategies across a range of robotic applications

• 5+ years of AI modelling experience, or PhD with 3+ years of industry experience
• Proven track record developing and deploying large-scale ML models end-to-end - not just fine-tuning
• Strong Python and PyTorch skills with the ability to debug complex models and reason about failure modes
• Experience in robotics, autonomous systems, or self-driving contexts
• Familiarity with diffusion and autoregressive model techniques, and simulation-to-production pipelines
• Background from self-driving, robotics labs, or frontier AI organisations is strongly preferred (e.g. TRI, Zoox, DeepMind or equivalent)
• Reinforcement learning and C++ experience beneficial but not mandatory

This company is at an inflection point that is genuinely rare: strong revenue growth, rapid headcount expansion, a Series C on the horizon, and a product that is already deployed in real industrial environments. Engineers here work directly on physical robots - not simulations - supported by an in-office demo facility.

The culture is high-energy and execution-focused, with a strong emphasis on curiosity, first-principles thinking, and comfort with ambiguity. The AI team is small and deliberately senior, which means real ownership from day one and a clear path into leadership as the team scales.

For candidates who want to build foundational robotics AI with genuine real-world impact - not incremental improvements to someone else's system - this is a compelling moment to join.
 

Please apply via this listing or reach out directly. All applications are handled in strict confidence.