{"id":819483,"url":"https://alion.io/job/shifters-ai-ai-engineer-foundational-vision-language-models-for-robotics","title":"AI Engineer - Foundational Vision & Language Models for Robotics","company":{"id":720831,"name":"Shifters AI","domain":"shiftersai.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/shiftersai","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workable","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":3,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-11-05T05:54:30Z"}},"role":"Robotics","role_family":"Robotics","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":["Yavne, Israel"],"countries":["IL"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Multi-Agent Systems","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"ROS","optional":false},{"name":"Vision-Language-Action","optional":false},{"name":"VLM","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-07-16T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-07-16","last_verified_at":"2026-11-05T08:27:36Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":112,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":112},"description":"Mid-Senior | Robotics | Applied Research & Deployment\nWe are hiring a Mid-Senior AI Engineer to join our AI team and work on large language, vision-language, and vision-language-action models for robotic autonomy. This role will focus on improving the robot’s reasoning, planning, and autonomous decision-making capabilities using modern foundational AI models.\nYou will collaborate closely with the AI, robotics, and embedded software teams to build intelligent robotic capabilities end to end - from model development and evaluation to integration and deployment on real robots with onboard compute.\nWhat You’ll Do\nDesign, develop, and deploy LLM-, VLM-, and VLA-based systems for robotic reasoning, planning, perception, and action.\nBuild agentic and multi-agent systems for robotic decision-making and task execution.\nDevelop human-robot interaction capabilities using language, vision, and multimodal inputs.\nFine-tune, adapt, evaluate, and deploy foundation models for real-world robotic use cases.\nIntegrate AI models with perception, navigation, control, and ROS-based robotic systems.\nWork on model deployment for fully onboard and hybrid edge/cloud compute scenarios.\nBuild evaluation pipelines for robot autonomy, model behavior, task success, reliability, and safety.\nCollaborate with embedded software and robotics engineers to connect high-level AI systems with real-time robot execution.\nTranslate research ideas into practical, robust systems that operate on physical robots.\nRequirements\nStrong background in Python, machine learning, deep learning, and applied AI development.\nHands-on experience working with LLMs, VLMs, multimodal models, or foundation model pipelines.\nExperience with model fine-tuning, prompting, evaluation, inference optimization, or deployment.\nFamiliarity with agent frameworks, tool-using models, planning systems, or similar architectures.\nStrong understanding of modern AI model development workflows, including data preparation, training, evaluation, and deployment.\nAbility to work across software boundaries, from research code to production-quality robotic systems.\nStrong systems thinking and the ability to reason about end-to-end autonomy pipelines.\nExperience debugging complex AI systems in real-world or simulated environments.","description_format":"text","description_chars":2283,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Robotics AI","Military & Tactical Robotics"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-12T12:26:37Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":8,"band":"cold","label":"Long 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