Research Engineer, Robotics Applications, Deepmind

Google Google · Big Tech · Mountain View, CA +1

Research Engineer at Google DeepMind focused on applying AI, specifically LLMs/VLMs, to robotics applications. The role involves benchmarking models on robot hardware, building demo tasks, and serving as a technical point-of-contact for testers, feeding insights back to the research team. This position bridges the gap between core AI research and real-world product deployment in robotics.

What you'd actually do

  1. Select and maintain a "gold standard" set of robot hardware, benchmark the model’s zero-shot performance on these platforms to understand capabilities and limitations before they reach partners.
  2. Build a library of out-of-the-box demo tasks (e.g., visual navigation, pick-and-place, semantic reasoning) that showcase the model's power in real-world scenarios.
  3. Serve as the primary technical point-of-contact for trusted testers (TT), troubleshoot unique hardware-software integration issues and feed those insights back into the core research team.
  4. Travel to partner sites up to 25% of the time.

Skills

Required

  • Computer Science
  • Robotics
  • software development
  • AI engineering
  • solutions architecture
  • machine learning tools and algorithms
  • Large Language Models (LLMs)
  • Vision Language Models (VLMs)
  • deep learning

Nice to have

  • ROS/ROS2
  • simulation environments (Isaac Sim, MuJoCo)
  • on-device deployment (Jetson, TPU)

What the JD emphasized

  • 5 years of experience in software development, AI engineering, or solutions architecture.
  • Experience with machine learning tools and algorithms, specifically Large Language Model (LLMs)/Vision Language Models (VLMs) and deep learning.

Other signals

  • robotics applications
  • LLMs/VLMs
  • deep learning
  • hardware-software integration
  • product innovation