Description
Senior AI Engineer - VLA Foundation Model
Team: Embodied AI
Location: Zürich
Commitment: Full-Time
Workplace Type: onsite
RIVR is a Swiss robotics company pioneering Physical AI and robotic solutions to revolutionize last-mile delivery, giving 1 human the power of 1000. Through the combination of artificial neural networks and innovative robot designs with wheels and legs, RIVR aims to enhance efficiency, sustainability, and scalability in last-mile delivery. Founded as Swiss-Mile, the company rebranded to RIVR in 2025 to better reflect its mission of driving the future of intelligent robotics. Join our innovative team, renowned for pioneering robotic design and neural network applications in robotics that improve environmental understanding and decision-making. With a robust research foundation and notable contributions from ETH Zurich, we are leaders in translating artificial intelligence and robotics into practical, real-world applications.
RIVR is committed to building a diverse and inclusive team that values every perspective. If you’re passionate about driving innovation in robotics and creating meaningful impact, we encourage you to apply and bring your unique self to our team.
Job Description
Our fleet of delivery robots operates globally today, generating vast amounts of robotic real-world data. By utilizing state-of-the-art Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, large-scale generalist models (like Transformers), generative AI, and similar methods, we can leverage this pool of data to significantly enhance its autonomy, navigation, and manipulation skills. In this role, you will develop multi-modal models that enable robots to autonomously generate actions from demonstrations, real-time sensor data, and natural language commands. We are seeking an expert in VLA models, imitation learning, and generative AI techniques with a deep knowledge of supervised, and self-supervised learning algorithms. If you are passionate about pushing the boundaries of AI we invite you to join us in shaping the future of intelligent robotics.
What you’ll be doing
- Develop and implement cutting-edge Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, generalist robot transformers, and imitation learning algorithms (e.g., diffusion policies) to enable robots to autonomously execute complex tasks.
- Design, test, and refine your algorithms to meet the demands of complex real-world autonomy and navigation tasks, with a focus on spatial reasoning and generalization.
- Streamline the data collection and training workflow to efficiently expand model capabilities with new tasks and data sources.
- Collaborate with the reinforcement learning team to innovate methods that leverage both simulated and real-world data.
- Optimize and distill networks for real-time deployment on the edge (e.g. Nvidia Jetson Thor).
- Build, lead and mentor an exceptional team of software engineers.
- Provide expert guidance to product managers and executives for strategic decision-making.
- Create and maintain documentation, guidelines, and best practices to streamline knowledge sharing.
What you must have
- Master’s degree or higher in a relevant field such as Engineering, Robotics, or Machine Learning.
- A minimum of three years of industry or research experience, with PhD experience applicable.
- Strong deep learning fundamentals including supervised learning, self-supervised learning, Transformer-based architectures, policy optimization algorithms, imitation learning, and generative AI techniques (including Diffusion Models).
- Proven experience in developing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models or large-scale generalist robot models (e.g., RT-2, Octo, etc.).
- Strong background in robotics including autonomy, navigation.
- Experience with deploying artificial neural networks on hardware platforms.
- Ability to prototype algorithms and train deep neural networks in Python (Pytorch)
Get some bonus points
- PhD degree in Robotics, Engineering, Computer Science, Machine Learning or a similar discipline, or an equivalent amount of research experience.
- Publications at top-tier conferences.
- Experience in managing a software team.
- Ability to write production-level code in modern C++
RIVR is committed to building a diverse and inclusive team that values every perspective. If you’re passionate about driving innovation in robotics and creating meaningful impact, we encourage you to apply and bring your unique self to our team.
We believe the best work is done when collaborating and therefore require in-person presence in our office locations.
There are more than 50,000 engineering jobs:
Subscribe to membership and unlock all jobs
Engineering Jobs
60,000+ jobs from 4,500+ well-funded companies
Updated Daily
New jobs are added every day as companies post them
Refined Search
Use filters like skill, location, etc to narrow results
Become a member
🥳🥳🥳 452 happy customers and counting...
Overall, over 80% of customers chose to renew their subscriptions after the initial sign-up.
To try it out
For active job seekers
For those who are passive looking
Cancel anytime
Frequently Asked Questions
- We prioritize job seekers as our customers, unlike bigger job sites, by charging a small fee to provide them with curated access to the best companies and up-to-date jobs. This focus allows us to deliver a more personalized and effective job search experience.
- We've got over 200,000 jobs from 15,000+ vetted companies. No fake or sleazy jobs here!
- We aggregate jobs from 15,000+ companies' career pages, so you can be sure that you're getting the most up-to-date and relevant jobs.
- We're the only job board *for* software engineers, *by* software engineers… in case you needed a reminder! We add thousands of new jobs daily and offer powerful search filters just for you. 🛠️
- Every single hour! We add 2,000-3,000 new jobs daily, so you'll always have fresh opportunities. 🚀
- Typically, job searches take 3-6 months. EchoJobs helps you spend more time applying and less time hunting. 🎯
- Check daily! We're always updating with new jobs. Set up job alerts for even quicker access. 📅
What Fellow Engineers Say