Robotics Machine Learning Engineer

Job Title: Robotics Machine Learning Engineer

Department: Software Engineering

Employment Type: Full-Time

FLSA Status: Exempt

Location: Houston, TX

Travel: 10%

Who We Are

Persona AI is building humanoid robots for the most demanding environments in heavy industry — shipyards, steel mills, fabrication facilities, and offshore platforms — performing welding, grinding, maintenance, inspection, and material-handling work that is dangerous, physically demanding, and increasingly difficult to staff.

We are backed by leading strategic and financial investors and engaged with global industrial leaders across Korea, Japan, the United States, and Singapore. Korea is the center of gravity for our early commercial strategy, anchored by relationships with the world’s leading shipbuilders and steelmakers. Our work spans both the robot platform itself and the systems, partners, and playbooks required to deploy it at scale.

Why Join Persona AI?

• We offer competitive compensation, a performance-based bonus, 100% employer covered medical benefits for most healthcare plans, early-stage equity, competitive PTO, and company-wide paid winter break between December 24th and January 2nd.

• You’ll shape technology that’s redefining the possibilities of robotics and human interaction.

• Work alongside passionate teammates who value creativity, and continuous learning.

About the Role

We're looking for a Machine Learning Engineer to drive Persona’s large-scale ML infrastructure and facilitate the robot learning effort. We're looking for exceptional talent who dream big, thrive on challenges, and love seeing their efforts make an impact on Persona’s humanoid robots doing real work in real-world environments.

You will be working extensively on large-scale data pipelines, training infrastructure, and robot evaluation procedures in simulation and on hardware. You will help Persona AI scale the ML effort effectively by managing data and training artifacts, and building solid production-level software across various ML components.

If you want to build a robust infrastructure to scale robot learning on all fronts, this role is for you.

What You Will Be Doing

• Contribute to Persona’s large-scale ML software stack across data, training, and evaluation.

• Design and implement the ML software infrastructure with thoughtful abstraction and scalability.

• Work with the ML team to craft and execute a comprehensive plan for the development of machine learning models.

• Develop comprehensive test suites to ensure correct and performant execution of the ML pipelines.

• Leverage cloud platforms for flexible compute capacity, data management, and task automation.

• Keep up to date with the state of the art in ML research and development.

• Collaborate in attracting, nurturing, and growing the Machine Learning and Data teams.

What We Are Looking For:

• 3+ years of experience in machine learning directly applied to robotics.

• Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, or a related field.

• Courage and grit to tackle complex large-scale engineering problems for robotics.

• Experience with production ML software deployment.

• Experience with cloud computing to develop models, store data, etc. (AWS, Azure, GCP).

• Strong expertise with deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow, etc.).

• Enthusiasm for working collaboratively in a fast-paced team environment.

• Capable of writing high-quality software in Python, C++, or Rust.

Bonus Skills:

• Experience with other aspects of ML applied to robotics, including robot simulation, locomotion, computer vision, robot hardware, and sensors.

• Experience with other aspects of software engineering, including CI/CD, build systems, and Docker.

• Have trained models and deployed them to robots in production environments.

Persona AI is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.