[Remote] Sr. ML Engineer, Autonomous Navigation

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Diligent Robotics is a company that envisions a future powered by robots working seamlessly with human teams. They are seeking a Sr. ML Engineer, Autonomous Navigation to develop learning-based navigation models for their service robot, Moxi, enhancing its ability to navigate safely around people and equipment. Responsibilities • Develop learning-based navigation models that predict safe, smooth trajectories from sensor inputs and/or perception representations • Build imitation learning pipelines from fleet logs (trajectory extraction, filtering, scenario balancing, evaluation) • Implement simulation-based refinement (RL, reward shaping, domain randomization) to improve robustness • Define navigation success metrics aligned to product outcomes • Collaborate with the AI Platform team to integrate learned policies behavior/safety systems and validate on-robot • Build regression tests and scenario replay suites for challenging scenarios • Analyze field behavior, identify failure modes, and close the loop through data curation and retraining Skills • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Robotics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related field (PhD a plus) • 5+ years of experience in ML for robotics and/or autonomous vehicles • Experience with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, behavior cloning, and/or transformer/diffusion policies for robotic control • Strong proficiency in PyTorch and experience with sequence models / policy learning • Experience with imitation learning and/or reinforcement learning in robotics or autonomy contexts • Experience with socially-aware navigation, dynamic obstacle avoidance • Experience with RL at scale (simulation rollouts, distributed training, stability/debugging) • Familiarity with ROS navigation stacks and safety constraints for mobile robots • Experience building eval harnesses (offline replay, scenario libraries) Company Overview • Diligent Robotics develops AI-powered robot assistants to collaborate with and adapt to humans in everyday environments. It is a sub-organization of Serve Robotics. It was founded in 2016, and is headquartered in Austin, Texas, USA, with a workforce of 201-500 employees. Its website is http://diligentrobots.com. Company H1B Sponsorship • Diligent Robotics has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 5 in 2025, 3 in 2024, 5 in 2023, 3 in 2022. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.