Research Engineer for Spatial Intelligence, Vision AI Platform

Team: Woven City Management

Location: Tokyo

Commitment: Employee

Workplace Type: hybrid

TEAM

Toyota is redefining what it means to move. We're challenging the current state of mobility by enhancing the movement of people, goods, information and energy. Centered around three core concepts - A Living Laboratory™, Human-Centered, and Ever Evolving City™ - Woven City serves as a test course for mobility to fulfill our purpose of well-being for all.

We do this by bringing together a diverse community of people with a shared passion for the future of mobility to co-create, develop and refine innovative products and services. This cross-section of social infrastructure, mobility, and people provides a unique opportunity for inventors, residents and visitors to interact seamlessly with new technologies throughout daily life in an environment that emulates a real city.

The Vision AI team is developing innovative products and services using technologies related to computer vision and Artificial Intelligence that enhances and leverages Woven City.

Our missions: 
　1. Develop services and products for Woven City
　2. Expand capabilities and competencies through long-term R&D

Toyota Motor Corporation has been involved in a variety of technological development such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and energy technologies, as well as automobile technologies. Toyota is already particularly strong in hardware and we will create additional value by developing new software on top of it.

 As a first party developer, we will not only develop innovative services essential to the city, but also a foundation upon which third party partners can participate. Not only are we developing applications but also more core basic software and capabilities.

 Our team consists of many mid-career members and members with international work experience. We strive to be open minded as we cultivate a new culture. We work closely with Toyota Motor Corporation, Toyota Research Institute in North America and Toyota Motor Europe to develop technologies and products. Our team consists of many members who originate from outside Japan. We provide a global work environment.

For more information about Woven City, please visit: https://www.woven-city.global/

WHO ARE WE LOOKING FOR?

We are seeking highly self-motivated research engineers with expertise in computer vision and broad engineering skills across both software and hardware to join our Tokyo-based team in building next-generation AI technologies for spatial intelligence. Our projects span a wide range of cutting-edge areas, including 3D scene understanding of physical environments; innovative interfaces that bridge the real and virtual worlds, including AI agents that interact with and influence human behavior to advance human-computer interaction; and advanced pipelines for human-scene understanding that support the development of future Physical AI systems. We are working toward AI systems that can perceive and understand the physical world, build rich digital representations of people, objects, and environments, and use this understanding for reasoning, decision-making, and real-world interaction. In addition to application-driven development, the team is actively engaged in academic research and encourages contributions to the research community through publications and other research outcomes.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Develop novel algorithms for computer vision applications, by connecting research elements into product and business through rapid prototyping, and present research findings both internally and externally
• Design, prototype, and develop production-ready systems that advance spatial intelligence and human-computer interaction. Bring research ideas and rapid prototypes into production as robust, scalable, and maintainable systems, working closely with researchers and backend/frontend engineers
• Explore and build novel interfaces that integrate across web, mobile devices, robots, smart glasses, and urban infrastructure
• Collaborate with world-class researchers to try experimental ideas and publish papers

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

• Master's in computer science, statistics, electrical engineering, other related areas or equivalent practical experience
• Programming experience in Python and proficiency in deep learning frameworks like PyTorch or Tensorflow
• Research experience in machine learning, deep learning, and computer vision, with a track record of publications at top-tier conferences or journals, e.g., CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ICRA, etc.
• Strong communication skills, both verbal and written in English

NICE TO HAVES

• Ph.D. in a relevant technical field
• Experience in research or algorithm development in areas such as 3D computer vision, including scene reconstruction and spatial reasoning, generative AI, and agentic AI
• Experience developing multimodal foundation models, including multimodal large language models (MLLMs), or generative AI products and services
• Experience defining and applying appropriate evaluation metrics and benchmarks for new features, models, algorithms, and end-to-end systems
• Experience training deep learning models on large-scale datasets
• Experience developing high-performance, scalable implementations of deep learning algorithms