Sr. Perception Software Engineer - Ultra Mobility Vehicle (UMV)
The Ai Institute
Software Engineering
Cambridge, MA, USA
Posted on Oct 21, 2025
Our Mission: Our mission is to solve the most important and fundamental challenges in AI and Robotics to enable future generations of intelligent machines that will help us all live better lives.
About UMV: Ultra Mobility Vehicle (UMV) is focused on advancing robot mobility to make machines more useful in everyday life. The team combines wheels, dynamic legged systems, and whole-body behavior to reach higher levels of movement capability. Using fast terrain perception, our robots adapt to their environment by rolling over or jumping on obstacles. This research is central to developing robotic systems that move with speed, agility, and versatility.
Senior Perception Software Engineer will have proven hands-on experience developing and integrating state of the art computer vision systems for real-life robot operation. Overall we are looking for T-shaped people – with deep competence in one of our core areas and broad understanding of the field as a whole.
What You Will Do:
- Integrate and extend current state-of-the-art vision algorithms and hardware to work on highly dynamic mobile robots, with high-rate and precision requirements.
- Work with Controls, Hardware, and other researchers on designing, training, developing, and deploying new vision algorithms for dynamic locomotion, navigation, state estimation, etc.
- Collaborate with other teams by designing modular software systems and assisting with software infrastructure like calibration efforts, camera drivers, and containerization.
- Promote and enforce quality and reliability of code through the application of best coding and design practices, mentorship, and regular code reviews.
- Share your innovative work with the community through publications at top-tier conferences (e.g., CORL, ICRA, IROS, RSS, CVPR, NeurIPS, etc.)
- Mentor junior engineers and researchers.
What We Are Looking For:
- BS, MS or PhD in computer science, robotics, electrical/mechanical/aerospace engineering, or a related field.
- 7+ years in a related industry
- Experience deploying algorithms on physical systems and solving the system level problems that arise.
- Strong programming skills with Python and C++.
- Experience with ROS 2 and robotic software integration.
- Good grasp of at least a handful of computer vision techniques, for example 3D localization, robot state estimation, depth sensing, object modeling, scene graphs, object pose estimation, Gaussian splatting, or point/object tracking.
- Proven track record of collaboration and mentorship of junior colleagues.
Stand Out With Any Of the Following:
- Direct, hands-on experience implementing and debugging factor graph state estimation systems (e.g., using libraries like GTSAM, Ceres, or custom solvers).
- Proven expert-level knowledge of ROS 2 middleware
- Deep expertise with IMUs, including calibration and integration.
- Deep expertise in software optimization, hardware acceleration or parallel computing (CPU, GPU, CUDA).
- A proven expert-level knowledge of deep learning in the context of robotics problems like semantic segmentation, 3D reconstruction, point cloud registration, or object detection.
- A track record of publishing at top-tier robotics and computer vision conferences.
We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibit discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.