# ML Systems Engineer, Robotics

**Company:** [Scale AI](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/scale-ai)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** ML Engineering
**Salary:** $218k – $273k/yr
**Experience:** 4+ years
**Skills:** Kubernetes, Docker, Python, Go, Rust, C++, CUDA, AWS, GCP, Terraform
**Posted:** 2026-02-18

> Designs and builds scalable platforms for serving foundation models in robotics and autonomous vehicles. Requires 4+ years in ML infrastructure, backend systems, GPU optimization, and cloud technologies.

## Job Description

## You Will:
- Build & Scale: Maintain fault-tolerant, high-performance systems for serving robotics-related models and foundation models at scale, ensuring low latency for real-time applications.
- Platform Development: Build an internal platform to empower model capability discovery, enabling faster iteration cycles for research teams working on robotics.
- Collaborate: Work closely with Robotics researchers and Computer Vision engineers to integrate and optimize models for production and research environments.
- Design Excellence: Conduct architecture and design reviews to uphold best practices in system scalability, reliability, and security.
- Observability: Develop monitoring and observability solutions to ensure system health and real-time performance tracking of model inference.
- Lead: Own projects end-to-end, from requirements gathering to implementation, in a fast-paced, cross-functional environment.

## Ideally, You'd Have:
- Experience: 4+ years of experience building large-scale, high-performance backend systems, with deep experience in machine learning infrastructure.
- Algorithm Optimization: Deep experience optimizing computer vision and other machine learning algorithms for cloud environments, including GPU-level algorithm optimizations (e.g., **CUDA**, kernel tuning).
- Programming: Strong skills in one or more systems-level languages (e.g., **Python**, **Go**, **Rust**, **C++**).
- Systems Fundamentals: Deep understanding of serving and routing fundamentals (e.g., rate limiting, load balancing, compute budgets, concurrency) for data-intensive applications.
- Infrastructure: Experience with containers (**Docker**), orchestration (**Kubernetes**), and cloud providers (**AWS**/**GCP**).
- IaC: Familiarity with infrastructure as code (e.g., **Terraform**).
- Mindset: Proven ability to solve complex problems and work independently in fast-moving environments.

## Nice to Haves:
- Exposure to Vision-Language-Action (**VLA**) models.
- Knowledge of high-performance video processing (e.g., **FFmpeg**, **NVDEC**/**NVENC**) or 3D data handling (point clouds).
- Familiarity with robotics middleware (e.g., **ROS**/**ROS2**) or AV data formats.

## Similar roles

- [Machine Learning Research Engineer, Agent Data Foundation - Enterprise GenAI](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/c04650e4-6722-4170-ae84-943c4d2aac4f) - Scale AI - San Francisco, CA - $218k – $273k/yr
- [ML Research Engineer, ML Systems](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/c814c5a3-7e79-4c03-8f4b-89eb8352da30) - Scale AI - San Francisco, CA - $218k – $273k/yr
- [AI Engineer, Applied ML](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/fa2a14c5-a9f8-41ed-b414-a6dc50f0126d) - Perplexity - San Francisco, CA - $220k – $405k/yr
- [AI Inference Engineer](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/76655dad-b39d-48cd-8de2-290b953d6d0c) - Perplexity - San Francisco, CA - $220k – $405k/yr
- [Software Engineer, Enterprise AI](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/98385fe7-6f4c-4386-ab6e-d4033a6d2440) - Scale AI - New York, NY - $216k – $270k/yr

**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/fd6494c5-b63a-412e-87fe-48b825f54495
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/fd6494c5-b63a-412e-87fe-48b825f54495