DevOps Engineer | SDE - 1 | SDE  - 2

Role: Senior AI Research Engineer

Function: AI Research & Development

Location: Bangalore

Type: Full-time

Industry: Construction Technology, Robotics, AI

About Company

An early-stage robotics startup building autonomous robots for US construction. The company tackles rising costs, safety risks, and labor shortages through AI-powered humanoid robotics.

Founded in 2025 with strong funding and a talent-dense team from top institutions. The company combines advanced AI with human-like robots to make building projects quicker, cheaper, and safer.

Position Overview

You'll transform cutting-edge vision-language and diffusion advances into robust real-time systems that see, reason, and act on dynamic construction sites. You'll lead research and development of next-generation AI models for autonomous construction robotics. You'll own the full AI research lifecycle from problem definition to production hand-off while mentoring team members and publishing breakthrough research.

Role & Responsibilities

• Research and innovate diffusion-based generative models for photorealistic wall-surface simulation, defect synthesis and domain adaptation
• Architect and train Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Vision-Language Action Models (VLA) that connect textual work orders, CAD plans and sensor data to pixel-level understanding
• Lead development of auto-annotation pipelines using active learning, self-training, and synthetic data that scale to millions of frames and point-clouds
• Optimize and compress models (INT8, LoRA, distillation) for deployment on Jetson-class edge devices under ROS 2
• Own the full AI research lifecycle from problem definition and literature review to prototyping, evaluation and production hand-off
• Publish internal tech reports and external conference papers while mentoring interns and junior engineers
• Collaborate with perception and controls teams to integrate research breakthroughs into production robotics systems

Must Have Criteria

• 8+ years in deep learning R&D or Ph.D./M.S. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics or related field
• Strong publication record in top-tier AI/ML conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV)
• Demonstrated expertise in diffusion models (DDPM, LDM, ControlNet) with hands-on implementation experience
• Proven experience with multimodal transformers and Vision-Language Models (CLIP, BLIP-2, LLaVA, Flamingo)
• Advanced proficiency in Python and PyTorch with experience in scalable training frameworks (PyTorch Lightning, DeepSpeed)
• Experience working with large-scale computer vision datasets (millions of images, terabytes of visual data)
• Proven success building large-scale data-centric AI workflows including active learning and pseudo-labeling

Nice to Have

• Experience with computer vision in construction, manufacturing, or industrial environments
• Experience with synthetic data generation in Isaac Sim or similar robotics simulation environments
• Familiarity with edge-AI runtimes (TensorRT, ONNX Runtime) and CUDA/C++ performance optimization
• Experience with robotics perception stacks (ROS2, Nav2, MoveIt 2, Open3D)
• Experience with JAX framework and distributed training on large GPU clusters

What We Offer

• Opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI research with real-world impact in construction automation
• Collaborate with a world-class team from top institutions including IITs, Stanford, and UCLA
• Access to state-of-the-art computing resources and robotics hardware for research
• Competitive compensation package with equity in a well-funded early-stage startup
• Direct impact on transforming a $1.8 trillion construction industry through autonomous robotics