Alert Venture Foundry (AVF) is a robotics-focused startup studio inventing and launching real-world robotic systems. Our teams work across hardware, embedded software, autonomy, and simulation to build systems that operate reliably outside the lab.

About the Role

We’re looking for an Applied Machine Learning Engineer (Robotics) to help us build practical AI/ML capabilities that improve how robots perceive, understand, and operate in the real world. In this role, you’ll work on computer vision and multimodal perception features, but your biggest impact will come from building the pipelines that turn raw robot data into clean, trainable datasets.

This is a great fit for a mid-career engineer or applied scientist who enjoys building end-to-end systems: collecting data, shaping it into usable formats, training and evaluating models, and integrating those models into a real robotic stack.

What you’ll do:

• Build data pipelines that transform raw robot data streams (images/video, telemetry, voice tags, operator inputs) into clean, structured datasets for training and evaluation
• Design dataset schemas, sampling strategies, and train/validation/test splits to support repeatable experiments and model iteration
• Develop and fine-tune computer vision models for tasks such as image classification and related perception capabilities

What we’re looking for:

• 3+ years of professional experience in machine learning, applied AI, or software engineering for data-driven systems, or equivalent academic and project experience
• Strong Python skills and the ability to build maintainable software for data processing, training workflows, and system integration
• Hands-on experience preparing datasets and training or fine-tuning ML models using common frameworks (e.g., PyTorch or TensorFlow)
• Experience working with real-world sensor or image data, including data cleaning, labeling workflows, and evaluation methodology

Bonus points for:

• Experience deploying ML models to edge hardware or real-time systems (e.g., ONNX, TensorRT, Jetson-class devices).
• Familiarity with robotics middleware and integration patterns (e.g., ROS2).
• Experience with speech-to-text, natural language understanding, or grounding operator intent into system actions.
• Comfort writing C++ for performance-critical components or extending existing robotics and ML codebases.
• Exposure to planning, optimization, or autonomy systems where ML outputs influence robot behavior.

Why AVF?

• Build ML capabilities that move from data to models to real-world robotic behavior
• Work closely with experienced engineers in a fast-paced, high-agency startup studio environment
• Help define practical ML workflows and data pipelines that accelerate iteration and deployment
• Contribute to robotic systems that reshape how physical work is performed in the real world

AVF is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds who are excited to build and deploy real-world robotic systems.