[Hiring] AI Research Engineer: Vision AI / VLM / Physical AI @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, and 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 like 3D Reconstruction projects and work with architectures like VGG-T (Visual Geometry Grounded Transformers).
• Physical AI Robotics team: Work at the intersection of simulation, robotics, and AI. Leverage NVIDIA’s Omniverse, Isaac Sim, and GR00T for advanced 3D simulation and robotics training.

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.
• Physical AI & Embodiment: Prototype perception-in-the-loop policies that close the gap from pixels to actions.
• Data & Evaluation at Scale: Curate datasets, author high-signal evaluation protocols/KPIs, and run ablations.
• Systems & Deployment: Package research into reliable services on a modern stack (Kubernetes, Docker, Ray, FastAPI).
• Agentic Workflows: Orchestrate multi-agent pipelines that combine perception, reasoning, simulation, and code generation.

Example Problems You Might Tackle

• Long horizon video understanding 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 with sim2real stress tests.

Qualifications

• Masters/Ph.D in CS/EE/Robotics (or related), actively publishing in CV/ML/Robotics.
• 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, 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 or temporal reasoning.
• Familiarity with ROS2, DeepStream/TAO, or edge inference optimizations.
• 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.
• 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: $140K - $150K Annually.