Machine Learning Performance Engineer, Covariant

$170-225k

SQL
HTML
JavaScript
Python
Linux
Tensorflow
NumPy
PyTorch
Mid and Senior level
San Francisco Bay Area

Office located in Emeryville, CA

Covariant

AI Robotics company

Open for applications

Covariant

AI Robotics company

101-200 employees

B2BArtificial IntelligenceEnterpriseRoboticsSupply Chain

Open for applications

$170-225k

SQL
HTML
JavaScript
Python
Linux
Tensorflow
NumPy
PyTorch
Mid and Senior level
San Francisco Bay Area

Office located in Emeryville, CA

101-200 employees

B2BArtificial IntelligenceEnterpriseRoboticsSupply Chain

Company mission

To build the Covariant Brain, a universal AI to give robots the ability to see, reason and act on the world around them.

Role

Who you are

  • Obsession with building products that deliver value to customers through solving hard ML and robotics challenges
  • 3+ years of professional experience working with real-world software systems, AI products, or AI research
  • Proficiency in Python and experience with tensor libraries (e.g. NumPy, PyTorch, TensorFlow)
  • Working knowledge of Linux, SQL, and web (e.g. HTML, Javascript, etc.)
  • A solid mathematical and statistical foundation with an understanding of how to apply ML concepts (e.g. training, evaluation, testing, fine-tuning, data sampling, etc.)
  • Demonstrated strong problem-solving ability: analyzing real-world problems and formulating solutions, iterating and formulating, shipping, and making an impact on products for customers
  • Clear communication and collaboration across teams: taking requests from customers, and PMs, and prioritizing work across SW and HW teams

Desirable

  • Trained, deployed, and analyzed ML models or robotics applications in production
  • Strong understanding of the state of the art in Computer Vision and Robotics literature
  • Experience working with complex data infra and highly concurrent SW systems

What the job involves

  • Each ML Performance Engineer will be expected to own a product family and use their understanding of the Covariant Brain to make improvements toward making robots highly autonomous
  • Own all performance aspects of a robotic application
  • Understand and iterate on all aspects of the Brain (models, algorithms, tooling, etc.) to resolve production failures and deliver human-level autonomy
  • Analyze robot performance for different errors, understand their root causes, and test/deploy improvements to production
  • Build tools to analyze a highly complex system of robots, models, components, and sensors to understand errors and enable more people across the org to make improvements to the system
  • Take real-world challenges and engineer ML & robotics solutions by training, testing, tuning, iterating, and deploying new and existing models to solve production problems
  • Collaborate closely with research, SW, HW, and infrastructure teams to deliver highly reliable robotic applications
  • Work closely with the HW team on the design of a robotic application including the gripper, vision suite, and station layout
  • Identify throughput bottlenecks in the application and work with the SW team to pinpoint and resolve them
  • Take experimental models from the research team, test them to validate improvement, and deploy them to solve application problems
  • Travel to the customer site as needed to resolve issues with robots in production (not expected for more than once per quarter, if needed at all)

Otta's take

Theo Margolius headshot

Theo Margolius

COO of Otta

Covariant's investors have solid backgrounds in AI research and academia and have a clear vision of how they want to impact the robotics industry. They have successfully deployed of the Covariant Brain in different sectors, including fashion, health, logistics, and pharmaceuticals.

Robotic AI has made huge leaps in recent years, but a global labour crunch means that supply chain and manufacturing firms are demanding more from their robotic workforces, requiring a precision and dexterity not yet reached without human assistance. Covariant exists to provide just this, outfitting robots with a universal AI for robotic manipulation.

With the global robotics industry expected to balloon to $86 billion by 2027, there is no shortage of firms working in this field. Competitors include Kindred and RightHand Robotics. However, Covariant is unique in its focus on autonomous robotics and in the range of its applications, which can be used in formerly difficult areas such as order picking regardless of the type of objects that need to be manipulated. It also has an edge in that its solution can be deployed to existing robots without new hardware or extensive reprogramming, significantly reducing onboarding costs.

Covariant has received significant funding for its product and is expanding internationally and into new verticals. It is looking to further develop the Covariant Brain and to maintain its market lead as companies continue to double down on investments in automation.

Insights

Top investors

Few candidates hear
back within 2 weeks

20% employee growth in 12 months

Company

Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)

Apr 2023

$75m

SERIES C

Jul 2021

$80m

SERIES C

Total funding: $222m

Company benefits

  • Vision and dental insurance
  • Flexible working hours
  • Equal opportunity employer
  • Work from home opportunities
  • Health insurance
  • Unlimited PTO
  • Lunch and dinner each day (for on-site employees)
  • Monthly health & wellness budget
  • Quarterly learning budget
  • 401k plan and match

Company values

  • Breaking new ground,  together
  • Learning constantly
  • Striving for empathy

Company HQ

Southwest Berkeley, Berkeley, CA

Founders

Tianhao Zhang

(Co-founder)

Tianhao worked as a Grad Researcher during their UCB PhD, before co-founding Covariant in September 2017.

Pieter Abbeel

(President & Chief Scientist)

Having taken a PhD at Stanford, Pieter started working as a Professor at UCB in 2008, before co-founding Gradescope and working as an OpenAI Research Scientist. They co-founded Covariant in 2017, where they have worked since.

Peter Xi Chen

(CEO)

PhD in Philosophy and a BA in Computer Science from Stanford. Started his career as a Research Scientist at Open AI before co-founding Covariant.

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