{"id":3172792,"url":"https://alion.io/job/opower-principal-applied-scientist-robotics","title":"Principal Applied Scientist - Robotics","company":{"id":1813620,"name":"Opower","domain":"opower.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/opower","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Oracle","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":83,"open_postings":93,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.871,"repost_share":0.022,"time_to_fill_p50_days":18,"computed_at":"2026-10-28T05:59:10Z"}},"role":"Robotics","role_family":"Robotics","seniority":"lead","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Santa Clara, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":126200,"max":264100,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":264100},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":7,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Computer Vision","optional":false},{"name":"Embodied AI","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Perception","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"ROS","optional":false},{"name":"Sensor Fusion","optional":false},{"name":"Synthetic Data","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-05T21:04:56Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-05","last_verified_at":"2026-10-28T00:56:50Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":83,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":83},"description":"The IC4 Applied Scientist for Robotics, Perception, and Embodied AI will serve as a senior technical leader responsible for defining, prototyping, and delivering AI capabilities for commercially viable robotic systems. This role partners across science, software engineering, product, and hardware teams to identify high-impact opportunities, translate ambiguous product needs into research and engineering roadmaps, and guide end-to-end solution development from data collection and experimentation through production deployment. The scientist will lead applied research in multi-sensor fusion, real-time signals, perception, multimodal reasoning, reinforcement learning, and action-conditioned planning, with a strong bias for hands-on execution and full-stack delivery.\n Key Responsibilities\nSolution Identification and Strategy\nPartner with science, engineering, product, and hardware leaders to identify strategic product needs where robotics, perception, and embodied AI can create measurable customer and business impact.\n\nEvaluate academic literature, industry benchmarks, robotics platforms, and commercially viable robot APIs to assess feasibility, technical difficulty, and delivery risks.\n\nBreak down ambiguous robotics and AI problems into clear research plans, model architectures, data requirements, evaluation criteria, and production milestones.\n\nSet science quality standards for applied robotics workstreams, including perception accuracy, latency, robustness, safety, reliability, and operational feedback metrics.\n\nPrioritize solutions using the scientific process, including modeling approaches, evaluation techniques, data collection strategies, and risk/reward tradeoffs.\n\nApplied Research and Model Development\nLead the design and execution of research programs and POCs for sensors, multi-sensor fusion, real-time signal processing, and perception systems.\n\nDevelop and guide approaches for object detection, tracking, activity recognition, scene understanding, and related perception capabilities in real-world environments.\n\nAdvance multimodal AI systems that combine signals such as camera, depth, lidar, audio, telemetry, proprioception, and task context.\n\nApply reinforcement learning, action-conditioned planning, decision-making, and reasoning methods to enable robot behaviors that are robust, measurable, and product-relevant.\n\nDefine dataset strategy, data quality criteria, labeling approaches, simulation or synthetic data opportunities, and evaluation protocols for robotics and embodied AI use cases.\n\nGuide modeltraining, fine-tuning, optimization, inference design, and compute/latency tradeoffs for real-time or near-real-time deployment scenarios.\n\nSolution Delivery and Production Integration\nLead full-stack execution across experimentation, data pipelines, model development, evaluation, deployment integration, and production monitoring.\n\nPartner closely with software engineering, machine learning engineering, hardware teams, and product stakeholders to integrate AI capabilities into robotic systems and services.\n\nEvaluate and review high-complexity code, establish best practices for repositories, version control, code review, documentation, testing, and deliveryreadiness.\n\nDefine operational metrics and user feedback loops to assess delivered solutions in production and inform future technical strategy.\n\nServe as an escalation point for complex robotics, AI, perception, and systems integration issues, driving root-cause analysis and durable solutions.\n\nResearch Leadership and Influence\nDemonstrate thought leadership in at least one business-critical area such as robot perception, multimodal systems, sensor fusion, reinforcement learning, or embodied AI.\n\nTranslate research insights into clear technical recommendations, patents, white papers, design documents, demos, or conference-quality publications where appropriate.\n\nMentor and guide scientists and engineers, raising the bar for applied research rigor, experimentation quality, and production readiness.\n\nEstablish productive collaborations with internal teams, external research groups, academic partners, or commercial robotics ecosystem partners where relevant.\n\nCore Competencies\nBias for action with a strong hands-on orientation; able to move from ambiguous idea to prototype, evaluation, and production path quickly.\n\nAbility to execute full-stack AI workflows spanning data, experimentation, modeling, evaluation, APIs, deployment, and feedback loops.\n\nStrong cross-functional collaboration with hardware teams, software engineering, ML engineering, product, operations, and leadership stakeholders.\n\nExcellent judgment in balancing scientific rigor, product urgency, systems constraints, safety, reliability, and customer impact.\n\nClear executive-level communication; able to explain complex robotics and AI tradeoffs to technical and non-technical audiences.\n\nRequired Technical Expertise\nDeep experience in machine learning, artificial intelligence, computer vision, perception, robotics, sensor fusion, real-time signal processing, or a closely related field.\n\nExperience with perception capabilities such as object detection, tracking, activity recognition, scene understanding, localization, or state estimation.\n\nExperience designing multimodal AI systems that combine heterogeneous data sources and reason over context, actions, and temporal signals.\n\nPractical knowledge of reinforcement learning, planning, sequential decision-making, robotics control interfaces, or action-conditioned model behavior.\n\nStrong programming capability in applicable languages such as Python and/or C++, and experience with modern ML frameworks and production-oriented software practices.\n\nFamiliarity with APIs, SDKs, or integration patterns from commercially viable robotics platforms.\n\nMinimum Qualifications\n10 years of experience in data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotics, computer vision, signal processing, statistical modeling, data mining, or a related field; OR\n\nBachelor's degree in Mathematics, Statistics, Computer Science, Data Science, Physics, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field and 11 years of relevant experience; OR\n\nMaster's degree in one of the above or related fields and 9 years of relevant experience; OR\n\nDoctorate in one of the above or related fields and 7 years of relevant experience.\n\n7+ years of hands-on experience with Python, C++, PyTorch, and ROS for software development, machine learning, and robotics applications.\n\nDemonstrated technical leadership guiding teams and stakeholders toward strategic goals.\n\nPreferred Qualifications\n15 years of experience in data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotics, computer vision, perception, signal processing, or related field; OR equivalent degree-based experience aligned to Oracle IC5 guidelines.\n\n2 years of leadership experience with or without direct reports, including technical direction, mentoring, project planning, or cross-functional execution.\n\n2 years of experience working with operating budgets and/or project financials, where applicable.\n\n5+ years of experience creating technical publications, patents, white papers, peer-reviewed conferenceor journal articles, or equivalent technical documentation.\n\nDemonstrated experience delivering robotics, embodied AI, perception, or multimodal systems from research concept into production or customer-facing environments.\n\nHands-on experience with commercial robot platforms, robot SDKs/APIs, simulation environments, telemetry pipelines, and real-time deployment constraints.\n\nSuccess Profile\nBuilds credibility as a senior applied science leader who can bridge research depth with pragmatic product delivery.\n\nOperates comfortably across sensors, models, APIs, hardware/software boundaries, and executive decision-making forums.\n\nRaises the bar for AI adoption in robotics by creating reusable patterns, evaluation standards, and scalable delivery practices.\n\nDisclaimer:Certain U.S. based or U.S. customer or client-facing roles may be required to comply with applicable requirements, such as immunization/occupational health mandates, and/or drug testing requirements.\nRange and benefit information provided in this posting are specific to the stated locations only\nUS: Hiring Range in USD from: $126,200 to $264,100 per annum. May be eligible for bonus, equity, and compensation deferral.\nOracle maintains broad salary ranges for its roles in order to account for variations in knowledge, skills, experience, market conditions and locations, as well as reflect Oracle's differing products, industries and lines of business.\nCandidates are typically placed into the range based on the preceding factors as well as internal peer equity.\nOracle US offers a comprehensive benefits package which includes the following:\n1. Medical, dental, and vision insurance, including expert medical opinion\n2. Short term disability and long term disability\n3. Life insurance and AD&D\n4. Supplemental life insurance (Employee/Spouse/Child)\n5. Health care and dependent care Flexible Spending Accounts\n6. Pre-tax commuter and parking benefits\n7. 401(k) Savings and Investment Plan with company match\n8. Paid time off: Flexible Vacation is provided to all eligible employees assigned to a salaried (non-overtime eligible) position. Accrued Vacation is provided to all other employees eligible for vacation benefits. For employees working at least 35 hours per week, the vacation accrual rate is 13 days annually for the first three years of employment and 18 days annually for subsequent years of employment. Vacation accrual is prorated for employees working between 20 and 34 hours per week. Employees working fewer than 20 hours per week are not eligible for vacation.\n9. 11 paid holidays\n10. Paid sick leave: 72 hours of paid sick leave upon date of hire. Refreshes each calendar year. Unused balance will carry over each year up to a maximum cap of 112 hours.\n11. Paid parental leave\n12. Adoption assistance\n13. Employee Stock Purchase Plan\n14. Financial planning and group legal\n15. Voluntary benefits including auto, homeowner and pet insurance\nThe role will generally accept applications for at least three calendar days from the posting date or as long as the job remains posted.\nCareer Level - IC4","description_format":"text","description_chars":10342,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":7,"management_years_min":2,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Life insurance","Parental leave","Vision insurance"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Data & Analytics","Energy & Utilities","Energy Efficiency","Customer & Retention Analytics"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-23T18:59:24Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":9,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.307,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":83,"expected_fill_days":18,"reasons":["conf:5","stale_co","velocity","win:tail","crowd:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-28T05:59:10Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":264100,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/opower-principal-applied-scientist-robotics","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/opower-principal-applied-scientist-robotics.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-28T06:21:42Z","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":8345,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-29T00:00:00Z"}},"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":1813620},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=1813620"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fopower-principal-applied-scientist-robotics"},{"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%2Fopower-principal-applied-scientist-robotics"},{"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%2Fopower-principal-applied-scientist-robotics"},{"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/opower-principal-applied-scientist-robotics\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fopower-principal-applied-scientist-robotics"}]}