TLM, Embodied AI

Position Overview

At TLM, Embodied AI, we are building artificial intelligence that empowers robots to work seamlessly with human teams. We envision a future where service robots collaborate with people in dynamic environments. In this role, you'll lead a mission-critical team responsible for building the AI that lives on the robot, owning the robotics software stack and the multimodal end-to-end models for perception, navigation, manipulation, and adaptive collaboration. This is a hands-on leadership opportunity in a startup setting where you will lead, build, mentor, and code to ensure systems perform effectively in the real world.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and grow an embodied-AI team that owns perception, planning, navigation, manipulation, and multimodal ML models, all running on edge platforms.
• Define the strategic technical roadmap for the robotics platform and embodied-AI capabilities from foundational models to real-time onboard inference and control.
• Architect and guide development of large multimodal ML models (vision, language, tactile) that drive physical robot behaviors, potentially leveraging foundation model approaches.
• Oversee integration between edge AI, firmware, OS, hardware, and cloud services for deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement.
• Provide hands-on leadership by mentoring engineers, reviewing code and models, and contributing directly to critical system components.
• Ensure AI and robotics systems meet safety, robustness, and regulatory requirements while driving performance metrics such as latency, reliability, and interpretability.
• Collaborate with cross-functional leaders (product, firmware, backend, customer success) to align the AI roadmap with business goals and deployment realities.
• Recruit top-tier AI and robotics engineering talent, define team structure, and foster a culture of technical excellence and experimentation.

Required Qualifications

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, ML, EE, or a related field with 8+ years of AI/ML experience.
• Proven history of delivering multimodal ML systems into production in real-world, safety-sensitive environments (e.g., robotics, autonomous vehicles).
• Strong expertise in perception, path planning, control systems, and model optimization for resource-constrained platforms.
• Hands-on technical ability: proficient in coding, training models, debugging, and architecting systems side-by-side with your team.
• Leadership experience in startups or fast-moving R&D environments, with a track record of building teams, setting direction, and scaling initiatives.
• Experience with foundation or vision-language-action models, physics-based simulation, or embodied-perception pipelines.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to align executives, engineers, and cross-functional teams on strategy, trade-offs, and results.