Lead AI Engineer
Leads research and productionization of diffusion, vision-language, and vision-language-action models for real-time robotic perception on construction sites. The role requires 8+ years of deep-learning R&D or an advanced degree with strong publications, plus expertise in scalable training and edge deployment.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Research and innovate diffusion-based generative models for photorealistic wall-surface simulation, defect synthesis, and domain adaptation.
- Architect and train Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Vision-Language Action Models (VLA) that connect textual work orders, CAD plans, and sensor data to pixel-level understanding.
- Lead auto-annotation pipelines using active learning, self-training, and synthetic data to scale to millions of frames and point clouds with minimal human effort.
- Optimize and compress models using INT8, LoRA, and distillation for deployment on Jetson-class edge devices under ROS 2.
- Own the full lifecycle from problem definition, literature review, and prototyping through offline/online evaluation and production handoff to perception and controls teams.
- Publish internal technical reports and external conference papers.
- Mentor interns and junior engineers.
Requirements
- 8+ years in deep-learning R&D, or a Ph.D./M.S. in CS, EE, Robotics, or a related field with a strong publication record.
- Demonstrated expertise in diffusion models, including DDPM, LDM, and ControlNet.
- Experience with multimodal transformers and VLMs, including CLIP, BLIP-2, LLaVA, or Flamingo.
- Proven success building large-scale data-centric AI workflows involving active learning, pseudo-labeling, and weak supervision.
- Advanced proficiency in Python and PyTorch or JAX.
- Experience with experiment tracking and scalable training using PyTorch Lightning, DeepSpeed, or Ray.
- Familiarity with edge-AI runtimes such as TensorRT and ONNX Runtime.
- Experience with CUDA and C++ performance tuning.
- Strong mathematical foundation in probability, information theory, and optimization.
- Ability to translate theory into production code.
Nice-to-haves
- Synthetic data generation experience with Isaac Sim.
- Experience with robotics perception stacks, including ROS 2, Nav2, MoveIt 2, or Open3D.
Skills
Python, PyTorch, JAX, Diffusion Models, Vision-Language Models, Multimodal Transformers, Active Learning, Pseudo-Labeling, Weak Supervision, TensorRT, Onnx Runtime, CUDA, C++, Ros 2, Isaac Sim
Similar jobs
AI Research jobsBuild Vanta’s organizational intelligence layer by shipping prototypes, internal tools, and AI agent workflows that make cross-source data useful to EPD, GTM, and other teams. The role requires recent hands-on LLM product work, independent problem scoping, and strong judgment around AI quality, reliability, cost, and latency.
Conduct applied research on AI agents, designing experiments and evaluation systems to improve reliability, context retention, and multi-step task completion. The role requires strong AI/ML research, engineering, experimental design, and communication skills.
Conduct research on long-horizon, multi-agent AI behavior by designing agent environments, analyzing large-scale data, and running experiments. The role requires strong research judgment, rapid execution, independence, and familiarity with current AI developments.
Build, optimize, and evaluate long-running and multi-agent AI systems, along with tools for monitoring and analyzing their real-world behavior. The role requires software engineering experience with coding agents, strong independence, and familiarity with current AI developments.