Applied Researcher - Deployment Intelligence & Continuous Learning
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Job description
Our models don't stop learning at deployment. A growing fleet of robots is generating real production data every day, and the gap between "works in the lab" and "works at a new customer site, forever" is a research problem, not just an ops one. As an Applied Researcher on the AI Research team, you'll own that gap: mining fleet sensor and video data for failure modes, building the monitoring that catches problems before customers do, and turning deployment data into continuous, measurable model improvement. This is a hands-on, ship-it role. We care far more about whether you can land a real improvement on the fleet than about producing research for its own sake., * Continuous Learning Loops: Design and ship pipelines that turn real deployment data (successes, failures, teleop corrections) into targeted fine-tuning and online policy improvement, closing the loop from field to model without a full retrain cycle every time.
- Fleet Data Analytics: Mine high-frequency multimodal sensor and video data across tens of thousands of fleet episodes to catch failure modes, drift, and regressions before they become customer-visible.
- RL for Deployment: Apply reinforcement learning (offline RL, RL fine-tuning, reward modeling from human and teleop feedback) to improve policies directly from real-world deployment data, not just simulation.
- Automated Fleet Monitoring: Build automated monitoring that flags anomalies, near-failures, and out-of-distribution scenes across the fleet in real time, and that decides what needs a human versus what the system can self-correct.
- Cross-Scene Generalization: Characterize and close generalization gaps as robots move to new sites, lighting, layouts, and objects; build the evaluation harnesses and data-selection strategies that make day-one performance at a new customer site predictable.
- End-to-End Ownership: Partner with Research, Data, and Deployment teams to turn a finding into a shipped improvement, from a data-analysis notebook to a production monitoring dashboard to a deployed model update.
Requirements
- Educational Background: Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in CS, Robotics, Statistics, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. Degree level doesn't matter to us; what matters is genuine passion for the work and a track record of hands-on effort that shipped into a real system, not just a benchmark.
- Applied ML Depth: Hands-on experience in at least two of: reinforcement learning, sensor-data modeling/anomaly detection, vision-language models, or continual/online learning.
- Production Instincts: Experience building monitoring, evaluation, or data pipelines for a live ML system, comfortable with the ambiguity of real-world fleet data versus curated benchmarks.
- Experimentation & Statistics: Comfortable designing and reading production experiments (A/B tests, canary rollouts, staged fleet deployments) and applying enough statistical rigor to tell a real regression from noise in messy real-world data.
- Technical Stack: Strong Python and PyTorch (or JAX); comfortable with large multimodal datasets and distributed compute (Slurm/GPU clusters).
- Communication: Able to turn a fleet-scale data investigation into a clear recommendation that researchers and operators can act on.
Bonus Points For
- Experience with robot fleets or other physically-deployed autonomous systems in the field, not just simulation.
- Experience building or fine-tuning perception or foundation models for automated monitoring, captioning, or anomaly detection.
- Background in statistical methods for detecting anomalies and drift (change-point detection, forecasting) applied to sensor or telemetry data.
- Experience with human-in-the-loop learning: reward modeling from operator corrections, active learning, or data curation from failure cases.