About this role

Pickle is looking for a dynamic and driven Applied Researcher in Robotics - Perception & AI to revolutionize the future of warehouse automation. You’ll design and develop algorithms that enable our robots to navigate complex environments precisely. We'd love to hear from you if you thrive on solving real-world robotics challenges in a collaborative, fast-paced startup environment.

What You’ll Accomplish

• Invent novel technologies to solve real-world problems related to robotic warehouse operations, including loading and unloading trucks.
• Maintain awareness of developments in the rapidly changing AI field, and will leverage new and exciting technologies to address our robotics challenges.
• Develop innovative technologies that improve key performance metrics for perception accuracy, task planning optimality, and model training pipeline efficiency.
• Leverage recent advances in foundation models, particularly vision language models, to efficiently generalize perception capabilities to handle new kinds of objects of interest.
• Leverage recent advances in model-based and model-free reinforcement learning and demonstration learning technologies to generate optimal task plans for loading and unloading trucks.
• Collaborate with colleagues to grow the Pickle AI team and overall corporate expertise in robotics and AI; collaboration is key to productivity that is more than the sum of the parts.

Who You Are

• A graduate degree, preferably a PhD, in a field related to robotics and AI.
• A solid track record of research and innovation, including publications in fields of interest.
• Broad familiarity with technologies for Robotics and AI, and deep experience in at least one of the following areas:
• Supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning methods.
• Robotic task planning, bin packing.
• Foundation models.
• Vision Language Models (VLMs).
• Perception models for segmentation and detection.
• Experience applying advanced AI methods to real-world robots, for example, manipulation applications, or autonomous vehicle applications.
• Excitement to work on open problems in robotics, where drag and drop from the literature might not always work (but sometimes does!).