ML Infra Engineer (Data Systems)

About the Company

Physical Intelligence is bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world. We are a group of engineers, scientists, roboticists, and company builders developing foundation models and learning algorithms to power the robots of today and the physically-actuated devices of the future.

About the Team

The Infrastructure organization builds the foundations that make large-scale learning possible at PI. This includes training systems, data platforms, evaluation pipelines, and the tooling that allows researchers and roboticists to work with massive datasets safely and efficiently.

Responsibilities

• Data Ingestion & Processing: Design and build high-throughput pipelines that validate, transform, and featurize raw multimodal data.
• Batch & Streaming Systems: Operate large-scale batch and streaming workflows over massive datasets.
• Storage Systems: Design object storage layouts, metadata systems, and efficient access patterns; choose file formats with performance and scalability in mind.
• Data Lifecycle Management: Build systems for backfills, dataset rebuilds, garbage collection, and large-scale transformations.
• Training-Time Performance: Optimize dataloaders, sharding, prefetching, caching, and throughput to reduce time from data arrival → model training.
• Metadata & Indexing: Build scalable metadata stores for datasets, annotations, and training artifacts.
• Data Movement: Move petabytes efficiently across clusters and environments.
• Operational Correctness: Implement observability, validation, and guardrails to prevent silent data regressions.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with cross-functional teams of researchers, engineers, and roboticists to translate evolving data needs into robust systems.

Requirements

• Strong software engineering fundamentals.
• Experience building distributed systems or large-scale data pipelines.
• Comfort reasoning about performance, memory, I/O, and storage efficiency.
• Familiarity with batch and/or streaming processing systems.
• Experience with object storage systems and data format tradeoffs.
• Ownership mindset: design, build, operate, and iterate on systems end-to-end.
• Enjoy working closely with researchers and unblocking fast-moving projects.

Nice to Have

• Experience with large ML training pipelines or dataloading systems.
• Knowledge of columnar or custom data formats.
• Experience with systems like ClickHouse, Ray, Flink, Spark, or similar.
• Hands-on experience operating petabyte-scale datasets.
• Debugging and fixing performance bottlenecks in data-heavy systems.