Senior Applied Scientist - Robotic Foundation Models

Description
Work Arrangement
Onsite - This position requires the employee to be onsite full time. The primary work location will be at the General Motors Global Technical Center in Warren, MI.
The Role
We are seeking a Senior Applied Scientist, Robotic Foundation Models to join our Advanced Development team within the Autonomous Robotics Center (ARC). In this role, you will research and develop state-of-the-art AI/ML approaches, especially Foundation Models, to tackle challenging problems in the areas of robot perception, whole-body motion planning/controls, spatial safety and autonomous manipulation.
Joining our team will provide you with the opportunity to work on cutting-edge technologies, contribute to innovation, and collaborate with a diverse team of experts. You will play a key role in advancing our automation capabilities and ensuring that our systems are at the forefront of the industry.
What You'll Do:

• Drive independent research and prototyping initiatives in robotics foundation models and reinforcement learning models, focusing on breakthrough approaches in perception, and manipulation, for example open-vocabulary panoptic scene understanding, scaling up multi-modal LLMs, sim2real/real2sim techniques, end-to-end vision-language-action (VLA) models, efficient model inference, video tokenization
• Lead technical projects from conceptualization through implementation, enabling robust performance in real world applications
• Work with engineers to process and prepare training data, including data governance, provenance tracking, data quality checks and creating reusable data pipelines.
• Design and execute experiments to test model capabilities on the simulator and on the embodiment, validate performance across different scenarios, create a baseline and iteratively improve model performance.
• Work closely with R&D, engineers, and leaders across multiple teams, participate in knowledge sharing, support integration efforts with robotics hardware teams, and help document best practices and methodologies.
• Stay updated with emerging technologies and best practices in robotics and lead and participate academic/industrial collaborations.
• Contribute to the team's technical strategy and help shape our approach to next-generation robotics challenges.
• Generate intellectual property, document results and publish papers.

Additional Description
Your Skills & Abilities (Required Qualifications)

• 3+ years of first-hand professional experience in Machine Learning and data driven approaches to visual perception and autonomy problems, with a good understanding of recent ML approaches such as LLMs & ViTs.
• Proficiency in Python or C++ with hands-on experience on Machine Learning frameworks (e.g. PyTorch) and model development, including training, tuning and optimization, for realistic applications.
• Familiarity with 3D computer vision and/or graphics pipelines.
• MSc in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or a related field.
• Passionate about robotics, with a strong desire to accelerate the application of robotics with AI.

What Will Give You a Competitive Edge (Preferred Qualifications)

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, Computer Vision or a related research field.
• A track record of relevant publications (e.g. ICRA, IROS, NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ICCV, RSS, CoRL) or product deliverables.
• Hands-on robotics experience, such as autonomous vehicles (AV), ADAS, or industrial automation systems in manufacturing environments.
• Experience with robotics frameworks such as ROS/ROS2, (e.g., Nav2, MoveIt).
• Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and modern software development practices.

This role may be eligible for relocation benefits.
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