Robot Infrastructure Engineer - Collection Tooling

Applied Intuition, Inc. is powering the future of physical AI. Founded in 2017 and now valued at $15 billion, the Silicon Valley company is creating the digital infrastructure needed to bring intelligence to every moving machine on the planet. Applied Intuition services the automotive, defense, trucking, construction, mining and agriculture industries in three core areas: tools and infrastructure, operating systems, and autonomy. Eighteen of the top 20 global automakers, as well as the United States military and its allies, trust the company’s solutions to deliver physical intelligence. Applied Intuition is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with offices in Washington, D.C.; San Diego; Ft. Walton Beach, Florida; Ann Arbor, Michigan; London; Stuttgart; Munich; Stockholm; Bangalore; Seoul; and Tokyo. Learn more at applied.co.

We are an in-office company, and our expectation is that full-time employees primarily work from their Applied Intuition office 5 days a week. However, we also recognize the importance of flexibility and trust our employees to manage their schedules responsibly. This may include occasional remote work, starting the day with morning meetings from home before heading to the office, or leaving earlier when needed to accommodate family commitments. This in-office expectation does not apply to contractor positions

About the role

Applied Intuition is building a robot learning platform on Dana, its physical AI platform: the data infrastructure and training intelligence a company needs to make any robot learn an industrial task and keep improving it. The robotics team builds that platform and uses it to deliver robot autonomy on customer lines, training, evaluating, and deploying policies on real robots doing real industrial tasks. Everyone on the team works hands-on with hardware and sees their work reach customers.

As a Robot Infrastructure Engineer focused on collection tooling, you will make high-quality robot demonstrations and human corrections easy to capture and use. You will build the teleoperation workflows, quality checks, and ingestion tools that turn a session at the robot into training data the team can trust. This is a tooling role, not a role running a large collection operation.

We are open to candidates at different experience levels who meet the requirements. We value demonstrated work on real systems, including equivalent practical experience, over a particular degree or title.

At Applied Intuition, you will:

• Build teleoperation and operator tools for leader arms, VR, and other interfaces, including calibration, action mapping, latency, and reliable recording.

• Implement episode workflows for task instructions, start and stop, resets, annotations, success labels, and human takeover, keeping a clean boundary between policy actions and human corrections.

• Build collection quality checks for frame drops, timestamp alignment, missing signals, calibration validity, and incomplete episodes, with feedback operators can act on immediately.

• Build collection specifications and adapters that validate data delivered by external partners against task requirements, schemas, calibration, and provenance.

• Keep raw recordings as the source of truth and make normalization and export to training formats reproducible.

• Show collection progress and coverage against the task so the team collects the missing variations and hard cases, not more of the same.

• Test everything on real robots and document setup and troubleshooting so engineers, operators, and partners can run collection without you in the room.

We're looking for someone who has:

• Built data collection, teleoperation, sensor recording, or human-in-the-loop tooling used on real robots or autonomous systems, and validated it on hardware.

• Strong Python skills and software engineering fundamentals, including APIs, tests, versioned schemas, and debugging data pipelines.

• Experience with synchronized video, robot state, actions, or other multimodal time-series data.

• Working knowledge of coordinate frames, sensor calibration, data provenance, and how collection errors show up in trained models.

• Experience building tools for other people, watching them fail in real use, and simplifying without hiding data-quality problems.

• The ability to turn a task description into an executable collection workflow together with learning, hardware, and operations colleagues.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with ROS 2, MCAP, LeRobot, HDF5, or adapters between robotics datasets.

• Experience with VR teleoperation, leader-follower systems, motion retargeting, haptics, or takeover-based learning.

• Experience building video and trajectory inspection, annotation, dataset validation, or data grading tools.

• Experience with sensor fusion, offline trajectory reconstruction, coverage analysis, or active data collection.

Compensation at Applied Intuition for eligible roles includes base salary, equity, and benefits. Base salary is a single component of the total compensation package, which may also include equity in the form of options and/or restricted stock units, comprehensive health, dental, vision, life and disability insurance coverage, 401k retirement benefits with employer match, learning and wellness stipends, and paid time off. Note that benefits are subject to change and may vary based on jurisdiction of employment.

Applied Intuition pay ranges reflect the minimum and maximum intended target base salary for new hire salaries for the position. The actual base salary offered to a successful candidate will additionally be influenced by a variety of factors including experience, credentials & certifications, educational attainment, skill level requirements, interview performance, and the level and scope of the position.

Don’t meet every single requirement? If you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

Applied Intuition is an equal opportunity employer and federal contractor or subcontractor. Consequently, the parties agree that, as applicable, they will abide by the requirements of 41 CFR 60-1.4(a), 41 CFR 60-300.5(a) and 41 CFR 60-741.5(a) and that these laws are incorporated herein by reference. These regulations prohibit discrimination against qualified individuals based on their status as protected veterans or individuals with disabilities, and prohibit discrimination against all individuals based on their race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or national origin. These regulations require that covered prime contractors and subcontractors take affirmative action to employ and advance in employment individuals without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status or disability. The parties also agree that, as applicable, they will abide by the requirements of Executive Order 13496 (29 CFR Part 471, Appendix A to Subpart A), relating to the notice of employee rights under federal labor laws.

FOR US-BASED ROLES: Applied Intuition is committed to providing an accessible and inclusive application and interview experience to applicants who are disabled veterans and other applicants with disabilities or medical conditions. Reasonable accommodations are available, requesting an accommodation will not affect your candidacy in any way, and you are not required to disclose the nature of your disability or medical condition in order to make a request. If you require an accommodation please contact [email protected]. We will work with you!