Associate AI Engineer, Physical AI

Avathon•Pleasanton, CA

About The Position

Avathon is seeking exceptional new computer science graduates who are builders at heart, writing software, conducting research, building ambitious projects, or pushing technology beyond what they’ve learned in the classroom. As an Associate AI Engineer, you will join Avathon’s AI Engineering team and work alongside AI researchers, applied scientists, and engineers to build the intelligence behind our Physical AI platform. You will work on hard technical problems spanning agentic AI, machine learning, reasoning, knowledge graphs, multimodal AI, time-series intelligence, optimization, and autonomous decision-making. In your first few years as an engineer, you will develop a powerful combination of AI depth, software engineering rigor, systems thinking, product judgment, and understanding of complex physical operations. You will learn how frontier AI moves from research and experimentation into production and how intelligent systems progress from prediction to reasoning, optimization, decision-making, and autonomous action.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in computer science from a leading computer science and engineering university; graduating in 2027
Strong academic achievement, with a cumulative undergraduate GPA of 3.6 or higher required
No prior full-time professional experience required
Exceptional foundation in algorithms, data structures, software engineering, probability, statistics, linear algebra, and computer science fundamentals
Strong programming ability, particularly in Python, with the ability to write high-quality, maintainable software
Strong understanding of machine learning and modern AI fundamentals, developed through coursework, research, internships, independent projects, or hands-on experimentation
Familiarity with modern AI/ML frameworks and a demonstrated ability to rapidly learn new models, tools, and technical concepts
Evidence that you build beyond the classroom through research, technically ambitious personal projects, open-source contributions, hackathons, competitive programming, startups, or other engineering work
Intellectual curiosity about how AI can interact with and ultimately reason about the physical world
High ownership and a desire to work in an environment where technical ambition, speed, experimentation, and execution are expected

Nice To Haves

Experience or demonstrated interest in areas such as LLMs, deep learning, agentic AI, computer vision, NLP, reinforcement learning, optimization, knowledge graphs, robotics, or autonomous systems

Responsibilities

Build physical AI: Develop intelligent systems that can understand complex operating environments, reason over real-world context, predict what happens next, and determine what actions should be taken
Build AI agents: Develop and evaluate agentic systems capable of reasoning, planning, using tools, interacting with enterprise and operational systems, and executing multi-step workflows
Advance machine intelligence: Build models and algorithms across prediction, anomaly detection, forecasting, classification, optimization, recommendation, and decision intelligence
Build knowledge & reasoning systems: Work with Avathon’s computational knowledge graph to give AI an understanding of relationships across assets, processes, materials, suppliers, operations, and complex industrial systems
Explore multimodal AI: Apply LLMs, vision models, time-series models, retrieval, and multimodal techniques across sensor signals, documents, images, video, engineering information, and enterprise data
Develop autonomous decision systems: Help move AI beyond prediction toward reasoning, prescription, optimization, planning, and increasingly autonomous action
Take AI from research to production: Turn promising algorithms, models, and prototypes into reliable, scalable AI systems capable of operating against large and complex real-world datasets
Experiment at the frontier: Rapidly prototype and evaluate emerging AI architectures, models, and techniques and determine where they can create meaningful advantages within Avathon’s platform
Engineer for the real world: Solve challenges involving scale, latency, reliability, model performance, explainability, and deployment where AI outputs can influence real operational decisions
Own real problems early: Work alongside Product and Forward Engineering teams on difficult customer and platform problems, with meaningful technical ownership from the start of your career