{"id":2774791,"url":"https://alion.io/job/navflex-physical-ai-rd-engineer","title":"Physical AI R&D Engineer","company":{"id":4440935,"name":"Navflex","domain":"navflex.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/navflex","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Broomfield, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":115000,"max":140000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":140000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Computer Vision","optional":false},{"name":"CUDA","optional":false},{"name":"CUDA Toolkit","optional":false},{"name":"Digital Twin","optional":false},{"name":"Edge AI","optional":false},{"name":"Gazebo","optional":false},{"name":"Isaac Lab","optional":false},{"name":"Isaac Sim","optional":false},{"name":"MuJoCo","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch C++","optional":false},{"name":"ROS","optional":false},{"name":"Sim-to-Real","optional":false},{"name":"SLAM","optional":false},{"name":"Synthetic Data","optional":false},{"name":"TensorRT","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-11T21:30:49Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-11","last_verified_at":"2026-10-18T13:17:21Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":36,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":36},"description":"About Navflex\nAt Navflex, we're pioneering the future of logistics automation through cutting-edge AI and robotics. Our autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) are transforming the way goods are loaded and unloaded, enabling plug-and-play solutions that streamline operations and enhance efficiency across the global supply chain for some of the world’s most demanding warehouse environments. Our international, cross-disciplinary team in the EU and USA pairs robust mechatronics with cutting-edge navigation and perception to deliver safe, reliable autonomy in real-world warehouses and yards. Join us in shaping the future of intelligent logistics.\nThe Role\nOur objective is autonomy in unstructured, real-world environments: vehicles that build a rich spatial understanding of their surroundings, reason about how they'll change, and act decisively within them. Progress compounds: fleet data becomes the substrate for world modeling and simulation, which lets us validate new behaviors faster than physical testing alone.\nYou'll work on problems where evaluation methodology is still evolving, and you'll contribute to shaping it alongside senior team members. We expect you to track the literature, judge what is ready for real hardware, carry results from prototype to validated capability, and work with core software engineering to bring it into production behind clear requirements and acceptance criteria. Staying current is part of the job, not something you do on your own time.\nThis is research and development, not research alone. We work on open problems, but always against a product roadmap, and a result counts when it reaches a vehicle and changes something a customer experiences. We move quickly, and nobody here disappears into a lab.\nFocus Area: Spatial AI\n Perception already runs on our vehicles across LiDAR, depth cameras, inertial sensing, and wheel odometry. You'll deepen its understanding: improve the accuracy and robustness of today's models, harden them against the conditions that degrade performance, and decide what should replace them.\nThe larger goal is a probabilistic 3D representation of the vehicle's surroundings that holds up over time: persisting through occlusion, decaying honestly when the world may have changed since it was last seen, and carrying calibrated uncertainty the rest of the stack can rely on. Warehouses are dynamic: pallets, people, and other vehicles move while unobserved. How it's encoded is an open question you'll help answer.\nThe same work extends into state estimation, where learned components complement the classical stack our autonomy team maintains: visual odometry, degeneracy prediction in geometrically weak environments, and pose uncertainty that's trustworthy rather than optimistic.\nSuccess Measures\nModels you build run on production vehicles, with field behavior backed by evaluation developed in partnership with the team, with your own contributions clearly reflected in the results\n\nCapabilities you prototype reach production because you contribute clear, well-documented work that the team can build against\n\nYou help evaluate external methods and contribute to team discussions on what's worth pursuing\n\nWhat You’ll Do\nTake promising methods from the literature through prototype to validated on-vehicle capability, then partner with core software engineering to turn a proof of concept into production code\n\nTrain, evaluate, and iterate on models using real fleet data: logs, rosbags, and multi-modal sensor streams from vehicles in production\n\nBuild and maintain the 3D representation the rest of the stack consumes, with the calibration and sensor health monitoring it depends on\n\nContribute to baselines and evaluation methodology, applying and refining standards set by the team\n\nWork with core software and test engineering on annotation pipelines, data infrastructure, and simulation tooling\n\nWhat You’ll Bring\nRequired\nMS or higher in Computer Science, Robotics, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field\n\nYou've contributed meaningfully to a research project or thesis, with exposure to presenting and defending results\n\nYou stay current with recent literature relevant to your area of focus.\n\nWillingness to seek guidance from senior team members on production-readiness decisions.\n\nStrong Python with modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch, plus working C++ or the clear ability to develop in it\n\nExperience training and evaluating models on real sensor data, not public benchmarks alone, across modalities such as camera, LiDAR, radar, depth, or inertial\n\nProfessional fluency in English\n\nPreferred\nDepth and current familiarity in one or more of:\n3D scene representation: occupancy, scene graphs, or neural and splat-based reconstruction\n\nSegmentation, detection, or other perception on real sensor data, including vision foundation model adaptation\n\nMulti-modal fusion across camera, LiDAR, radar, depth, or inertial data\n\nSLAM, visual odometry, or geometric computer vision\n\nUncertainty quantification and calibrated probabilistic modeling\n\nResearch you took onto physical hardware, from a lab platform to a production system\n\nExperience with ROS and ROS 2\n\nGPU deployment and inference optimization, for example CUDA or TensorRT\n\nSimulation, synthetic data, or digital twins, for example Gazebo, Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, MuJoCo, or NVIDIA Cosmos, plus sim-to-real practices\n\nCompensation and Benefits\nThe base salary range for this role is $115,000 - $140,000 depending on experience, technical background, and demonstrated qualifications relevant to this position. This range reflects the expected base compensation for this role in Colorado; final offers are determined based on the selected candidate's specific experience and skills.\nIn addition to base salary, this role is eligible for:\nMedical, dental, and vision insurance\n\nPaid time off\n\nPaid sick leave in accordance with applicable law\n\nApplication Deadline: This posting will remain open until filled.\nNavflex is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other status protected by applicable law.","description_format":"text","description_chars":6262,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"master","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[{"language":"English","level":"Advanced (C1)","optional":false}]},"benefits":["Vision insurance"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","Logistics","Industrial Real Estate"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-17T08:08:35Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":42,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.47,"p_room":0.9,"age_days":36,"expected_fill_days":60,"reasons":["conf:0","win:mid"],"computed_at":"2026-10-18T13:50:25Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":140000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/navflex-physical-ai-rd-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/navflex-physical-ai-rd-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-18T13:50:25Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":20558,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-19T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":4440935},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=4440935"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fnavflex-physical-ai-rd-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fnavflex-physical-ai-rd-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fnavflex-physical-ai-rd-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/navflex-physical-ai-rd-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fnavflex-physical-ai-rd-engineer"}]}