Senior Applied Scientist Robotic Foundation Models

Job description

**Job Description**

**Work Arrangement**

Onsite - This position requires the employee to be onsite full time.

The primary work location will be at the General Motors Global Technical Center in Warren, MI.

**The Role**

We are seeking a Senior Applied Scientist, Robotic Foundation Models to join our Advanced Development team within the Autonomous Robotics Center (ARC).

In this role, you will research and develop state-of-the-art AI/ML approaches, especially Foundation Models, to tackle challenging problems in the areas of robot perception, whole-body motion planning/controls, spatial safety and autonomous manipulation.

Joining our team will provide you with the opportunity to work on cutting-edge technologies, contribute to innovation, and collaborate with a diverse team of experts.

You will play a key role in advancing our automation capabilities and ensuring that our systems are at the forefront of the industry.

**What You’ll Do:**

+ Drive independent research and prototyping initiatives in robotics foundation models and reinforcement learning models, focusing on breakthrough approaches in perception, and manipulation, for example open-vocabulary panoptic scene understanding, scaling up multi-modal LLMs, sim2real/real2sim techniques, end-to-end vision-language-action (VLA) models, efficient model inference, video tokenization
+ Lead technical projects from conceptualization through implementation, enabling robust performance in real world applications
+ Work with engineers to process and prepare training data, including data governance, provenance tracking, data quality checks and creating reusable data pipelines.
+ Design and execute experiments to test model capabilities on the simulator and on the embodiment, validate performance across different scenarios, create a baseline and iteratively improve model performance.
+ Work closely with R&D, engineers, and leaders across multiple teams, participate in knowledge sharing, support integration efforts with robotics hardware teams, and help document best practices and methodologies.
+ Stay updated with emerging technologies and best practices in robotics and lead and participate academic/industrial collaborations.
+ Contribute to the team's technical strategy and help shape our approach to next-generation robotics challenges.
+ Generate intellectual property, document results and publish papers.

**Your Skills & Abilities (Required Qualifications)**

+ 3+ years of first-hand professional experience in Machine Learning and data driven approaches to visual perception and autonomy problems, with a good understanding of recent ML approaches such as LLMs & ViTs.
+ Proficiency in Python or C++ with hands-on experience on Machine Learning frameworks (e.g. PyTorch) and model development, including training, tuning and optimization, for realistic applications.
+ Familiarity with 3D computer vision and/or graphics pipelines.
+ MSc in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or a related field.
+ Passionate about robotics, with a strong desire to accelerate the application of robotics with AI.

**What Will Give You a Competitive Edge (Preferred Qualifications)**

+ PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, Computer Vision or a related research field.
+ A track record of relevant publications (e.g. ICRA, IROS, NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ICCV, RSS, CoRL) or product deliverables.
+ Hands-on robotics experience, such as autonomous vehicles (AV), ADAS, or industrial automation systems in manufacturing environments.
+ Experience with robotics frameworks such as ROS/ROS2, (e.g., Nav2, MoveIt).
+ Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and modern software development practices.

This role may be eligible for relocation benefits.

#LI-BC1


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Required Skill Profession

Other General