Senior AI Engineer - Robotics & Autonomous Systems

ABOUT DATAMENTORS

Datamentors is a robotics start-up building an agnostic orchestration platform and a family of proprietary robots — quadruped, mobile upper-body and humanoid — assembled at our own factory in Caniçal, Madeira. We also develop custom Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models that give our robots natural-language reasoning and autonomy, deployable across sectors from hospitality and healthcare to defence and logistics. With prototypes running and a clear path to 600 units per year, the engineers joining now will shape both the hardware and the intelligence behind Ardia for years to come.

ROLE OVERVIEW

As a Senior AI Engineer, you will develop the core AI models that power autonomous robots. Working across computer vision, spatial intelligence, multimodal learning and robot foundation models, you will build systems that enable robots to perceive their environment, reason about complex scenes and execute tasks safely and autonomously.

You will work across the complete AI lifecycle—from data collection and model training to deployment and continuous improvement on real robotic platforms. This role combines cutting-edge AI research with production engineering, bridging advanced machine learning and real-world robotics.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• 5+ years of professional experience in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning or Computer Vision.
• Expert knowledge of PyTorch and deep learning model development.
• Strong experience training large-scale neural networks from scratch and fine-tuning foundation models.
• Experience in one or more of the following: Computer Vision, Vision-Language Models (VLMs), Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, Video foundation models, Spatial AI, 3D Computer Vision, Robot Learning, Imitation Learning, Reinforcement Learning
• Strong understanding of 3D geometry, camera models, coordinate transformations and sensor calibration.

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• Experience developing segmentation and perception systems for real-world environments.
• Experience building scalable training, evaluation and data curation pipelines.
• Familiarity with multi-GPU distributed training and CUDA optimisation.
• Strong software engineering skills with Python and modern ML tooling.
• Ability to work collaboratively with multidisciplinary robotics teams.
• Excellent communication skills and a research-to-production mindset.

NICE TO HAVE

• Experience with Gr00t, OpenVLA, Psi0, Pi0.5, Diffusion Policy or similar policy-learning architectures.
• Experience with NeRF, Gaussian Splatting or modern 3D scene representations.
• Experience with Segment Anything (SAM) and foundation vision models.
• Experience with Isaac Sim or MuJoCo for synthetic data generation.
• Familiarity with LiDAR, RGB-D cameras and robotic perception systems.

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• Experience deploying AI models on physical robots.
• Experience optimising models for real-time inference and edge deployment.

WHY DATAMENTORS

• Help build the AI powering the next generation of autonomous robots.
• Work across the full AI stack—from perception and foundation models to deployment on real robotic platforms.
• Apply cutting-edge research to real-world robotics challenges with measurable impact.
• Collaborate with an experienced multidisciplinary team spanning AI, robotics, perception and controls.
• Influence the technical direction of our AI platform from day one.
• Competitive salary.
• Relocation support with housing assistance.
• Join one of Europe's most ambitious Physical AI companies and help shape the future of intelligent machines.