Robotics Applied Scientist, Active Perception

FieldAI • Irvine, CA

2d • Onsite

About The Position

FieldAI’s Irvine team develops risk-aware, reliable, field-ready AI systems for robots operating in real-world environments. The Robotics Applied Scientist will research and develop active perception capabilities for inspection and other robot behaviors, taking work from research through experiments on real hardware to demonstrate feasibility and deployability. The role also contributes to the technical roadmap and mentors junior team members and collaborators. The team builds and tests systems using real robots and sensors, then deploys them in unstructured, previously unknown environments. The role is based in Irvine, California, with collaboration across the US and internationally. Compensation is described as generous; final base pay depends on role scope, job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and the Irvine market, but no salary figures are provided.

Requirements

• PhD in robotics, computer science, electrical engineering, aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, or a related field.
• Publications at top venues such as RSS, CoRL, ICRA, IROS, T-FR, T-RO, CVPR, NeurIPS, or similar.
• Research experience in active perception, informative path planning, vision-language models, or semantic mapping for exploration.
• Hands-on experience with vision-language or foundation models for robot perception, and knowledge of the physical principles governing them.
• Fluency in Python and ability to run methods on real robots using C++ and ROS 2.
• Principled fluency with uncertainty, including Bayesian or information-theoretic planning, calibration, and conformal methods.

Nice To Haves

• Real-robot experience in the field.
• Work on metric-semantic scene graphs, open-vocabulary mapping, or spatio-temporal scene representations.
• Experience fine-tuning or deploying compact vision-language models on edge computers.
• Exposure to robotic industrial inspection workflows.

Responsibilities

• Formulate active perception problems for inspection and a broad range of robot behaviors.
• Develop viewpoint-planning policies for active information gathering.
• Research calibrated confidence and abstention for vision-language reasoning on robots.
• Own research and development through real-world experiments that demonstrate feasibility and deployability.
• Investigate and shape the technical roadmap, aligning real-world needs with technical development.
• Mentor junior team members and collaborators.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree