Senior Robotics Engineer, Mission Autonomy

FieldAI’s Irvine team is where embodied AI meets real robots, real sensors, and real field deployments. Based in the heart of Southern California’s robotics ecosystem, we build risk-aware, reliable, field-ready AI systems that solve the hardest problems in robotics and unlock the full potential of embodied intelligence. If you want your work to ship, get tested on hardware, and improve through real deployments, Irvine is the place. We go beyond typical data-driven approaches or pure transformer-only architectures, combining rigorous engineering with learning systems proven in globally deployed solutions that deliver results today and get better every time our robots run in the field.

Field AI is transforming how robots interact with the real world. We are building risk-aware, reliable, and field-ready AI systems that address the most complex challenges in robotics, unlocking the full potential of embodied intelligence. We go beyond typical data-driven approaches or pure transformer-based architectures, and are charting a new course, with already-globally-deployed solutions delivering real-world results and rapidly improving models through real-field applications.

Learn more at https://fieldai.com.

Field AI is seeking a rigorous and innovative Senior Robotic Autonomy Engineer for Mission Autonomy to play a vital role in the development of highly advanced robotic and AI systems by designing and implementing intelligent decision-making frameworks. Your contribution is essential to advancing our autonomous robotic platforms and delivering cutting-edge AI-driven solutions to customers. This is a unique career opportunity to join a rapidly growing company and contribute to the success of enterprise clients in a dynamic, fast-paced environment. 

Perception-Aware Mission Autonomy: Couple runtime perception outputs (e.g. semantic 3D scene understanding) with world information, to create a unified semantic scene graph that enables perception-aware real-time mission planning and execution with spatial reasoning, feasibility validation, online task replanning, and natural language driven robotic autonomy.

VLM-Based Long-Horizon Reasoning: Design and implement a VLM-based mission controller that observes the robot's camera view and scene graph, reasons about mission progress, and selects actions from reusable primitives and tools, with step verification, failure detection and recovery, online replanning, and feedback handling for natural language driven long-horizon missions.

Multi-Robot Mission Autonomy: Support the development of a multi-robot mission autonomy framework for task allocation, execution monitoring, and coordination across heterogeneous robots, and expand the robotics testing framework through unit and integration tests to ensure system reliability, safety, and performance.

PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or a related field.

Advanced proficiency in Python programming, C++, ROS/ROS 2, Linux, Git, Docker

5+ years experience with AI-driven autonomy software deployed on real robots (e.g. task and motion planning, VLM/LLM-based planners, state machines, behavior trees) and low-level robotic manipulation skills 

Ability to effectively and efficiently communicate with all teams, and to lead technical efforts across them 

Strong problem-solving skills and proven ability to navigate complex software systems

Strong work ethic, highly self-motivated, and able to work independently while managing multiple priorities

Experience with simulation environments (e.g., Gazebo, Isaac Sim)

Experience with heterogeneous multi-robot systems (UGV, UAV, mobile manipulator)

Experience with LLM/VLM-based long-horizon planning and failure recovery in robotic systems