Principal Applied Scientist - Robotics

The IC4 Applied Scientist for Robotics, Perception, and Embodied AI will serve as a senior technical leader responsible for defining, prototyping, and delivering AI capabilities for commercially viable robotic systems. This role partners across science, software engineering, product, and hardware teams to identify high-impact opportunities, translate ambiguous product needs into research and engineering roadmaps, and guide end-to-end solution development from data collection and experimentation through production deployment. The scientist will lead applied research in multi-sensor fusion, real-time signals, perception, multimodal reasoning, reinforcement learning, and action-conditioned planning, with a strong bias for hands-on execution and full-stack delivery. Key Responsibilities Solution Identification and Strategy Partner with science, engineering, product, and hardware leaders to identify strategic product needs where robotics, perception, and embodied AI can create measurable customer and business impact. Evaluate academic literature, industry benchmarks, robotics platforms, and commercially viable robot APIs to assess feasibility, technical difficulty, and delivery risks. Break down ambiguous robotics and AI problems into clear research plans, model architectures, data requirements, evaluation criteria, and production milestones. Set science quality standards for applied robotics workstreams, including perception accuracy, latency, robustness, safety, reliability, and operational feedback metrics. Prioritize solutions using the scientific process, including modeling approaches, evaluation techniques, data collection strategies, and risk/reward tradeoffs. Applied Research and Model Development Lead the design and execution of research programs and POCs for sensors, multi-sensor fusion, real-time signal processing, and perception systems. Develop and guide approaches for object detection, tracking, activity recognition, scene understanding, and related perception capabilities in real-world environments. Advance multimodal AI systems that combine signals such as camera, depth, lidar, audio, telemetry, proprioception, and task context. Apply reinforcement learning, action-conditioned planning, decision-making, and reasoning methods to enable robot behaviors that are robust, measurable, and product-relevant. Define dataset strategy, data quality criteria, labeling approaches, simulation or synthetic data opportunities, and evaluation protocols for robotics and embodied AI use cases. Guide model training, fine-tuning, optimization, inference design, and compute/latency tradeoffs for real-time or near-real-time deployment scenarios. Solution Delivery and Production Integration Lead full-stack execution across experimentation, data pipelines, model development, evaluation, deployment integration, and production monitoring. Partner closely with software engineering, machine learning engineering, hardware teams, and product stakeholders to integrate AI capabilities into robotic systems and services. Evaluate and review high-complexity code, establish best practices for repositories, version control, code review, documentation, testing, and delivery readiness. Define operational metrics and user feedback loops to assess delivered solutions in production and inform future technical strategy. Serve as an escalation point for complex robotics, AI, perception, and systems integration issues, driving root-cause analysis and durable solutions. Research Leadership and Influence Demonstrate thought leadership in at least one business-critical area such as robot perception, multimodal systems, sensor fusion, reinforcement learning, or embodied AI. Translate research insights into clear technical recommendations, patents, white papers, design documents, demos, or conference-quality publications where appropriate. Mentor and guide scientists and engineers, raising the bar for applied research rigor, experimentation quality, and production readiness. Establish productive collaborations with internal teams, external research groups, academic partners, or commercial robotics ecosystem partners where relevant. Core Competencies Bias for action with a strong hands-on orientation; able to move from ambiguous idea to prototype, evaluation, and production path quickly. Ability to execute full-stack AI workflows spanning data, experimentation, modeling, evaluation, APIs, deployment, and feedback loops. Strong cross-functional collaboration with hardware teams, software engineering, ML engineering, product, operations, and leadership stakeholders. Excellent judgment in balancing scientific rigor, product urgency, systems constraints, safety, reliability, and customer impact. Clear executive-level communication; able to explain complex robotics and AI tradeoffs to technical and non-technical audiences. Required Technical Expertise Deep experience in machine learning, artificial intelligence, computer vision, perception, robotics, sensor fusion, real-time signal processing, or a closely related field. Experience with perception capabilities such as object detection, tracking, activity recognition, scene understanding, localization, or state estimation. Experience designing multimodal AI systems that combine heterogeneous data sources and reason over context, actions, and temporal signals. Practical knowledge of reinforcement learning, planning, sequential decision-making, robotics control interfaces, or action-conditioned model behavior. Strong programming capability in applicable languages such as Python and/or C++, and experience with modern ML frameworks and production-oriented software practices. Familiarity with APIs, SDKs, or integration patterns from commercially viable robotics platforms. Minimum Qualifications 15 years of experience in data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotics, computer vision, signal processing, statistical modeling, data mining, or a related field; OR Bachelor's degree in Mathematics , Statistics, Computer Science, Data Science, Physics, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field and 11 years of relevant experience; OR Master's degree in one of the above or related fields and 9 years of relevant experience; OR Doctorate in one of the above or related fields and 7 years of relevant experience. 7+ years of hands-on experience with Python, C++, PyTorch , and ROS for software development, machine learning, and robotics applications. Demonstrated technical leadership guiding teams and stakeholders toward strategic goals. Preferred Qualifications 16 years of experience in data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotics, computer vision, perception, signal processing, or related field; OR equivalent degree-based experience aligned to Oracle IC5 guidelines. 2 years of leadership experience with or without direct reports, including technical direction, mentoring, project planning, or cross-functional execution. 2 years of experience working with operating budgets and/or project financials, where applicable. 5+ years of experience creating technical publications, patents, white papers, peer-reviewed conference or journal articles, or equivalent technical documentation. Demonstrated experience delivering robotics, embodied AI, perception, or multimodal systems from research concept into production or customer-facing environments. Hands-on experience with commercial robot platforms, robot SDKs/APIs, simulation environments, telemetry pipelines, and real-time deployment constraints. Success Profile Builds credibility as a senior applied science leader who can bridge research depth with pragmatic product delivery. Operates comfortably across sensors, models, APIs, hardware/software boundaries, and executive decision-making forums. Raises the bar for AI adoption in robotics by creating reusable patterns, evaluation standards, and scalable delivery practices. Disclaimer: Certain U.S. based