About Qualcomm Robotics

Qualcomm Advanced Robotics Team is building the AI first stack and platform for the next generation general purpose robots - from AMRs and cobots to emerging humanoids by pairing heterogeneous compute (CPU/GPU/DSP/NPU) with a full Robotics SDK and developer tooling for manipulation, perception, navigation, and fleet workflows. We are leveraging our success in automated driving product portfolio, advanced AI end to end development and tools, and safety architecture to accelerate the growth in this emerging market.

About the Role

We are seeking a Physical AI Model Optimization Engineer to help bring cutting‑edge robotic AI models onto Qualcomm Dragonwing chipsets using Qualcomm’s internal deployment and optimization toolchains. This role is highly execution‑focused and centers on applying existing Qualcomm tools, workflows, and compilers to onboard, optimize, validate, and deploy advanced AI models for real‑time robotic systems.

A key responsibility of this team is creating and maintaining a curated library of robotics‑focused AI models that are pre‑optimized for deployment on Qualcomm chips. These models—spanning perception, control, VLA, and multimodal reasoning—will be packaged, validated, and made available for customers as high‑performance, deploy‑ready components that accelerate their development cycles.

You’ll work hands‑on with next‑generation models transforming research architectures into reliable, hardware‑efficient implementations. You will work directly with Qualcomm’s AI Stack and contribute targeted fixes, enhancements, or feature requests that improve Qualcomm’s internal pipelines for robotics-focused usecases.

Your work will directly impact real robots—and the teams building them.

What you’ll do

Preferred Qualifications:

• 3+ years of experience in embedded or on-device AI, model optimization, or performance engineering.

• Strong hands-on experience applying quantization (PTQ/QAT), pruning, compression, mixed-precision tuning, and model transformation techniques.

• Experience using vendor-specific AI optimization pipelines (Qualcomm preferred; others such as TensorRT, TVM, XLA, or ONNX Runtime are also relevant).

• Proficiency with PyTorch (preferred), including model graph manipulation, tracing, and conversion workflows.

• Understanding of the numerical behavior and accuracy trade-offs of low-precision AI.

• Ability to diagnose and address performance bottlenecks in compute, memory, and bandwidth.

• Experience deploying AI models to embedded or heterogeneous compute systems.

• Experience with the Qualcomm AI Stack, NPU/DSP optimization, or related chipset-specific AI workflows.

• Robotics domain experience, especially with real-time constraints.

• Familiarity with large multimodal or transformer-based architectures.

• C++ skills for minor kernel-level tweaks or integration fixes.

Why Join Us?

• Shape the core platform that powers intelligent, safe, and scalable robotic operations.

• Work with some of the most advanced robotic AI models on the planet.

• Influence the optimization and deployment pipeline for next-generation robotic intelligence.

• Competitive compensation, deep technical growth, and the opportunity to shape the future of on-device AI.

Qualcomm is an equal opportunity employer. If you are an individual with a disability and need an accommodation during the application/hiring process, rest assured that Qualcomm is committed to providing an accessible process. You may e-mail disability-accomodations@qualcomm.com or call Qualcomm's toll-free number found here. Upon request, Qualcomm will provide reasonable accommodations to support individuals with disabilities to be able participate in the hiring process. Qualcomm is also committed to making our workplace accessible for individuals with disabilities. (Keep in mind that this email address is used to provide reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities. We will not respond here to requests for updates on applications or resume inquiries).