Senior Staff AI Software Engineer, Perception

<div class="content-intro"><p>Agility’s commercially deployed humanoids operate alongside teams in warehouses, manufacturing facilities, and distribution centers—tackling physically demanding and repetitive tasks while enabling workers to focus on higher-value work. With industry-leading safety standards and years of proven deployment data, we're pioneering a new era of automation that enhances human potential.</p></div><p><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Agility Robotics builds Digit, the world's first commercially deployed humanoid robot — already at work in real warehouses and manufacturing facilities today. Digit has proven itself in structured work cells, and now we're pushing beyond them: into open floors, shared aisles, and dynamic spaces where people, forklifts, and other robots are all moving at once. That shift raises the bar for perception dramatically — Digit needs to reliably understand and react to an environment that's no longer predictable or controlled.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 10pt;">That means perception isn't just about capability — it's about trust. Every person Digit works near is counting on our perception systems to see them, understand them, and never get it wrong, whether Digit is in a fixed work cell or navigating a busy, ever-changing facility. We're looking for a <strong>Senior Staff AI Software Engineer, Perception</strong> to own the technical vision and system architecture for how Digit perceives and stays safe as we take on these more dynamic, less constrained environments.</span></p> <h2><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>What You'll Do</strong></span></h2> <ul> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Own the technical vision and system architecture for Perception that enables safety and efficiency, defining how Digit will perceive and reason about humans and hazards as it expands from structured work cells into open, dynamic environments</span></li> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Analyze key architectural tradeoffs across sensing modalities, model design, redundancy, and compute budget, balancing safety, latency, and real-world robustness</span></li> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Stay hands-on with development to prototype, validate, or build critical pieces yourself</span></li> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Partner with functional safety and systems engineering to define the safety case strategy, identifying what architecture and evidence will be required</span></li> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Support failure mode and hazard analysis at the system level, shaping which risks the architecture must design around</span></li> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Evaluate emerging research and technology, and decide what's worth adopting into future robot architectures</span></li> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Set standards for verification and validation of ML-based perception systems, especially for rare and safety-critical scenarios</span></li> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Collaborate across navigation, controls, and hardware to make sure the perception architecture serves the whole robot</span></li> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Act as a senior technical mentor and partner to engineers and technical leads across the organization, and represent the architecture to executive leadership, partners, and customers as needed</span></li> </ul> <h2><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>What You Bring</strong></span></h2> <ul> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">8+ years in machine learning/perception for robotics, with a track record of defining system architecture</span></li> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Master's or Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Computer Science, or a related field, with a strong foundation in machine learning, robotics, and intelligent systems</span></li> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Demonstrated experience architecting ML/perception systems for safety-critical or safety-rated contexts — human detection, functional safety, automotive or robotics or a comparable regulated domain</span></li> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Deep expertise in deep convolutional neural networks, multi-object tracking, data association, supervised learning, and pose estimation, with strong intuition for where these approaches break down in unpredictable, real-world conditions</span></li> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Experience making system-level tradeoffs across sensing modalities, redundancy, and compute constraints on embedded/real-time hardware</span></li> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">A track record of setting technical direction at an organization level</span></li> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Publications in your field are a plus (CVPR, ICCV, RSS, ICRA preferred)</span></li> </ul> <h2><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Nice to Haves</strong></span></h2> <ul> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Direct experience supporting a safety case or certi