ML Systems Engineer Robotics

Scale's Physical AI business unit is dedicated to solving the data bottleneck across Robotics Autonomous Vehicles and Computer Vision. This position will be a key contributor in conducting applied research in Physical AI and developing ML pipelines for processing training and fine-tuning on data collected by Scale with a specific focus on optimizing algorithms and pipelines to run efficiently on GPUs in the cloud. In this role you will have the opportunity to advance research shape Scale’s offerings and expand the frontier of data and model evaluation for Physical AI.

The Role 

As an ML Systems Engineer on the Physical AI team you will design and build platforms for scalable reliable and efficient serving of foundation models specifically tailored for physical agents. Our platform powers cutting-edge research and production systems supporting both internal research discovery and external customer use cases for autonomous vehicles and robotics.

The ideal candidate combines strong ML fundamentals with deep expertise in backend system design. You’ll work in a highly collaborative environment bridging the gap between Physical AI research and production engineering to accelerate innovation across the company.

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.

What We Do

Scale accelerates the development of AI applications by helping machine learning teams generate high-quality ground truth data. Our advanced LiDAR image video and NLP annotation APIs allow machine learning teams at companies like OpenAI Lyft Pinterest and Airbnb focus on building differentiated models vs. labeling data.