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Salary
$150k – $200k per year
Location
In office (San Francisco)
Seniority
Middle · 3+ years exp
Visa
H-1B filings in 12 months: 1 · for this role: 1
Employment
Full-Time

Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Nov 1, 2026. First seen by Alion on Apr 16, 2026. Deft AI scores B on the Alion truth index.

Overview
Company
Impact
Profile match
Deft AI is a robotics company that deploys wheeled humanoid robots at automotive and electronics manufacturers and their tier 1 and tier 2 suppliers. Its job ads cover robot autonomy, SLAM, controls, mechanical and electrical design and research scientist roles. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States.
Backed by Springcamp

What you'll do

  • Design and develop a modular robot autonomy stack that composes Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models with purpose-built modules to enable grasping and dexterous behaviors in unstructured environments
  • Develop action refinement and safety layers that post-process VLA outputs - constraint satisfaction, collision and force guards, smoothing, and runtime monitors for safety-critical deployment
  • Architect clean interfaces and abstractions around base VLA models so they can be swapped, benchmarked, and upgraded as the SOTA evolves - keeping the stack model-agnostic
  • Design and maintain robust data collection and curation pipelines for production robot fleets
  • Build reliable, high-speed robot autonomy software stack optimized for inference performance
  • Advance SOTA dexterous manipulation architecture through novel methodologies while bridging theory & practice-real customer use-cases with clear success criteria.

Required Qualifications

  • PhD or MS degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or equivalent technical discipline
  • Deep expertise in machine learning fundamentals, reinforcement learning, and associated frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, Ray, etc.)
  • 3+ years of proven track record developing and deploying ML systems from research through production implementation
  • Hands-on experience with model lifecycle management including training, deployment, and maintenance in production settings

Preferred Qualifications

  • Authored or co-authored peer-reviewed publications in robotics or related fields
  • Hands-on experience designing and implementing bimanual manipulation tech stacks with imitation learning or RL-based methods
  • Background in real-time ML inference systems, simulation-to-reality transfer, or advanced reinforcement learning implementations

Benefits

  • We support publishing at top robotics/ML venues and presenting at conferences (travel + time fully covered).
  • Medical, dental & vision plans
  • Daily meals stipend

Hiring Process

  • Phone screen + 3 virtual technical interviews + onsite

Expected Compensation

  • $150,000 - $200,000 annual salary + cash and stock awards + benefits
  • The pay offered for this position may vary based on several individual factors, including job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. The total compensation package may also include additional components/benefits depending on the specific role. This information will be shared if an employment offer is extended.
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