AI Research and Development Engineer (Physical AI)

This role involves developing and deploying physical AI models for robotics, focusing on high-performance, real-time systems on edge hardware. It is suitable for engineers working at the intersection of research and low-level optimization, contributing to open-source projects.

Location: Remote Netherlands

Salary: €74,990–€139,760/yr

Responsibilities

• Implement and fine-tune Vision-Language-Action policies for robotic manipulation and control.
• Export and optimize VLA models for edge deployment without accuracy loss.
• Develop safety runtimes for real-world operation.
• Build and maintain model-agnostic inference APIs for various robotic platforms.
• Support deployment across edge accelerators and inference runtimes.
• Publish research papers on vision, physical AI, model optimization, and robotic learning.

Requirements

• Extensive experience with PyTorch and PyTorch Lightning, including distributed training.
• Hands-on experience with robotic systems, including industrial robots, EMR, and humanoid robots.
• Familiarity with robotics hardware and software stacks such as cameras, depth sensors, ROS, and robot deployment.
• Deep understanding of VLA architectures and imitation learning for embodied agents.
• Technical expertise in model export and optimization, including graph compilation and precision calibration.
• Familiarity with inference backends like OpenVINO, ONNX Runtime, and ExecuTorch.
• Ability to write clean, modular Python code and manage complex deployment dependencies.

Benefits

• Build open-source tools for the robotics community.
• Own the full pipeline from training to physical control.
• Prioritize performance and real-world utility.
• Contribute to a hardware-agnostic stack for physical intelligence.