[Hiring] AI Research Engineer @Centific

Role Description

Are you pushing the frontier of computer vision, multimodal large models, and embodied/physical AI—and have the publications to show it? Join us to translate cutting-edge research into production systems that perceive, reason, and act in the real world.

We are building state-of-the-art Vision AI across:

• 2D/3D perception
• Egocentric/360° understanding
• Multimodal reasoning

As an AI Research Engineer, you will own high-leverage experiments from paper → prototype → deployable module in our platform.

You could be part of:

• Computer Vision team: Dive into the world of 3D reconstruction, scene understanding, and visual AI. Explore innovative techniques to transform real-world spaces into immersive 3D models.
• Physical AI Robotics team: Work at the intersection of simulation, robotics, and AI, leveraging NVIDIA’s Omniverse for advanced 3D simulation and collaboration.

What You’ll Do

• Advance Visual Perception:
  • Build and fine-tune models for detection, tracking, segmentation (2D/3D), pose & activity recognition, and scene understanding (incl. 360° and multi-view).
• Multimodal Reasoning with VLMs:
  • Train/evaluate vision–language models (VLMs) for grounding, dense captioning, temporal QA, and tool use.
  • Design retrieval-augmented and agentic loops for perception-action tasks.
• Physical AI & Embodiment:
  • Prototype perception-in-the-loop policies that close the gap from pixels to actions (simulation + real data).
  • Integrate with planners and task graphs for manipulation, navigation, or safety workflows.
• Data & Evaluation at Scale:
  • Curate datasets, author high-signal evaluation protocols/KPIs, and run ablations that make results irreproducible impossible.
• Systems & Deployment:
  • Package research into reliable services on a modern stack (Kubernetes, Docker, Ray, FastAPI), with profiling, telemetry, and CI for reproducible science.
• Agentic Workflows:
  • Orchestrate multi-agent pipelines (e.g., LangGraph-style graphs) that combine perception, reasoning, simulation, and code generation to self-check and self-correct.

Example Problems You Might Tackle

• Long horizon video understanding (events, activities, causality) from egocentric or 360° video.
• 3D scene grounding: linking language queries to objects, affordances, and trajectories.
• Fast, privacy-preserving perception for on-device or edge inference.
• Robust multi-modal evaluation: temporal consistency, open-set detection, uncertainty.
• Vision conditioned-policy evaluation in simulation (Isaac/MuJoCo) with sim2real stress tests.

Qualifications

• Masters/Ph.D in CS/EE/Robotics (or related), actively publishing in CV/ML/Robotics (e.g., CVPR/ICCV/ECCV, NeurIPS/ICML/ICLR, CoRL/RSS).
• Strong PyTorch (or JAX) and Python; comfort with CUDA profiling and mixed precision training.
• Demonstrated research in computer vision and at least one of:
  • VLMs (e.g., LLaVA style, video-language models)
  • Embodied/physical AI
  • 3D perception
• Proven ability to move from paper → code → ablation → result with rigorous experiment tracking.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with video models (e.g., TimeSFormer/MViT/VideoMAE), diffusion or 3D GS/NeRF pipelines, or SLAM/scene reconstruction.
• Prior work on multimodal grounding (referring expressions, spatial language, affordances) or temporal reasoning.
• Familiarity with ROS2, DeepStream/TAO, or edge inference optimizations (TensorRT, ONNX).
• Scalable training: Ray, distributed data loaders, sharded checkpoints.
• Strong software craft: testing, linting, profiling, containers, and reproducibility.
• Public code artifacts (GitHub) and first-author publications or strong open source impact.

What Success Looks Like

• A publishable or open-sourced outcome (with company approval) or a production-ready module that measurably moves a product KPI (latency, accuracy, robustness).
• Clean, reproducible code with documented ablations and an evaluation report that a teammate can rerun end-to-end.
• A demo that clearly communicates capabilities, limits, and next steps.

Benefits

• Real impact: Your research ships—powering core features in our MVPs and products.
• Mentorship: Work closely with our Principal Architect and senior engineers/researchers.
• Velocity + Rigor: We balance top-tier research practices with pragmatic product focus.
• Salary: $180,000-$240,000 + OTB

Company Description

Centific is an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, age, mental or physical disability, medical condition, sex (including pregnancy), gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital status, familial status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.