General Motors · 10 hours ago
Applied Scientist - AI & Robotics (PhD) - Early Career
Mountain View, CA
Full-time
Hybrid
Senior Level
$130K/yr - $170K/yrGeneral Motors is advancing how intelligent robotic systems perceive, act, and adapt in the physical world. As a Senior Applied Scientist, you will lead the development of end-to-end AI systems for robotic platforms, focusing on dexterous manipulation and multimodal understanding while collaborating with various teams to bring research into deployment.
AutomotiveElectric VehicleInformation ServicesManufacturingTransportation
Responsibilities
Design and implement advanced robot learning architectures (e.g., diffusion policies, ACT, VLM/VLA agents, imitation learning) to support manipulation, path planning, and autonomous execution
Build end-to-end model training pipelines for robotics applications, integrating multi-modal sensor data such as RGB, depth, force/torque, LiDAR, and proprioceptive signals
Develop scalable policy inference and control loops, pairing high-level perception with motion planning and on-robot execution
Apply or extend large-scale architectures—LLMs, VLMs, VLAs, diffusion models—to embodied tasks, sim-to-real adaptation, and grounding
Collaborate with cross-functional teams to translate research prototypes into deployable robotics software, ensuring robustness, efficiency, and safety
Design data collection, demonstration strategies, and simulation frameworks to support offline training, imitation learning, and hardware validation
Stay current with state-of-the-art advancements in embodied AI, robot learning, and manipulation, and share findings through internal research discussions and presentations
Qualification
Required
PhD in a relevant STEM field (e.g., Computer Science, Electrical/Mechanical Engineering, Robotics, or related discipline), or a Master's degree with equivalent industry experience in applied robotics or robot learning
Proven experience in building and deploying ML models on robotic systems—including training, evaluation, and integration with real or simulated platforms
Deep understanding of modern AI architectures (e.g., Transformers, VLMs/VLAs, diffusion models, CNNs) and hands-on experience training models at scale
Strong implementation ability in PyTorch, including writing custom modules, batching, debugging, and performance/efficiency considerations
Practical experience with ROS/ROS2 or robotics middleware and integrating learning components into manipulation or motion-control workflows
Demonstrated research impacts through robotics/ML publications or contributions to production-grade robotics systems
Ability to translate ambiguous embodied AI problems into well-scoped experiments, and maintain rigorous evaluation, ablation, and statistical validation practices
Preferred
Experience developing robot learning systems for manipulation, motion planning, or autonomous behaviors (e.g., diffusion policies, ACT, behavioral cloning, offline RL)
Hands-on expertise with robotics perception, including 3D understanding, depth/RGB fusion, multimodal grounding, or force/torque sensing
Familiarity with simulation environments such as Isaac Sim, Mujoco, Gazebo, or PyBullet, and demonstrated experience with sim-to-real transfer strategies
Working knowledge of robotics middleware (ROS/ROS2) and integration of ML components into real-time robotic stacks
Experience building or adapting foundation models for embodied tasks (VLMs/VLAs, multimodal diffusion, instruction-following agents)
Track record of production-ready robotics systems, open-source contributions, or publications in top-tier robotics/AI venues
Benefits
GM offers a variety of health and wellbeing benefit programs.
Benefit options include medical, dental, vision, Health Savings Account, Flexible Spending Accounts, retirement savings plan, sickness and accident benefits, life insurance, paid vacation & holidays, tuition assistance programs, employee assistance program, GM vehicle discounts and more.
This job may be eligible for relocation benefits.
Company
General Motors
General Motors is an automotive company that designs, produces, markets, and distributes vehicles and vehicle parts.
Founded in 1908
10001+ employees
H1B Sponsorship
General Motors has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
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Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (599)
2024 (740)
2023 (450)
2022 (795)
2021 (748)
2020 (452)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$8.51BKey Investors
US Department of Energy
2025-05-05Post Ipo Debt· $2B
2024-10-31Grant· $8M
2024-07-11Grant· $500M
Leadership Team
Mary Barra
Chair and Chief Executive Officer
Tony Cervone
Senior Vice President, Global Communications
Recent News
2025-12-30
Business – Latest Financial & Stock Market News | New York Post
2025-12-30
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