Director of AI

Overview

The Director of AI will lead the strategic direction and execution of all artificial intelligence and machine learning initiatives, fostering a culture of innovation and ethical AI development.

Core Responsibilities and Deliverables

• Define and champion the overall AI strategy and roadmap in alignment with the company's product vision and business goals.

• Lead the selection and integration of advanced machine learning models, algorithms, and deep learning techniques relevant to embodied AI (e.g., perception, manipulation, natural language understanding).

• Foster a culture of innovation, rigorous research, and responsible AI development that supports the team's ongoing success.

• Ensure that all AI systems adhere to the highest standards of safety, privacy, and ethical guidelines.

• Partner with Hardware and Robot Software leadership to ensure the sensor suite and embedded compute are optimized for current and future AI model architectures.

• Oversee the design, development, and deployment of on-robot and cloud-based AI systems, leveraging the existing team's expertise.

• Establish MLOps best practices for efficient model training, deployment, monitoring, and iteration.

• Drive research into novel AI solutions for complex robotics challenges, such as real-time planning, human-robot interaction, and adaptive motor control.

• Deliver production-ready AI models that meet performance, latency, and reliability requirements for commercial deployment.

• Spearhead the Sim2Real strategy, utilizing physics-based simulation (e.g., MuJoCo, Isaac Sim) to train robust policies that transfer seamlessly to hardware.

• Accelerate our data flywheel strategy to combine teleoperation, synthetic data, and fleet learning to expand the fleet performance and reliability.

Required Qualifications

• Advanced degree (M.S. or Ph.D.) in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.

• Minimum of 8 years of experience in AI/ML, with at least 3 years in a senior leadership or directorial role.

• Demonstrated experience in developing and deploying real-time AI solutions for robotics, autonomous systems, or other mission-critical applications.

• Strong expertise in core AI domains, including computer vision, reinforcement learning, and large language models (LLMs) applied to robotics.

• Proven track record of managing significant technical budgets and scaling high-performance engineering and research teams.

• Experience deploying models on resource-constrained edge devices, balancing inference speed, power consumption, and thermal limits.