Robotic Vision Research Scientist

At Sharpa, we manufacture time by making robots useful.

Founded in 2024, Sharpa is an AI robotics company inspired by the Sherpa people of the Himalayas - known for guiding and assisting alpinists on their difficult journey to the summit. We build general purpose robots that assist, not replace, humans - freeing people from repetitive and strenuous work so they can pursue inspiring endeavors.

Our team is made up of geeks and innovators with backgrounds at leading AI and robotics companies. We are dedicated to developing ultra-high performance, autonomous robotic systems capable of adapting to the complexity of real world environments. Sharpa operates out of Singapore, Shanghai and Mountain View.

What you'll be doing:

• Conduct research and development in computer vision for robotic systems, including perception, 3D vision, real-to-sim, scene understanding, object detection and tracking, pose estimation, segmentation, or vision-language models.
• Develop robust visual perception capabilities that enable robots to understand, interact with, and operate in real-world environments.
• Work closely with robotics, control, embodied AI, and hardware teams to translate research ideas into deployable robot capabilities.
• Design experiments, analyse model performance, and improve robustness across different environments, objects, and task conditions.
• Stay current with advances in computer vision, embodied AI, and robotics; contribute to technical direction and research roadmaps.
• Publish research findings in leading conferences and journals where relevant, and contribute to patents or open-source projects where appropriate.

What we're looking for:

• PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• Strong research track record, demonstrated through high-quality 1st author publications at leading conferences or journals, such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, RSS, CoRL, etc.
• Strong foundations in computer vision and deep learning, with expertise in one or more areas such as 3D vision, visual perception, generative models, vision-language-action models, or multimodal learning.
• Proficiency in Python and deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX.
• Ability to independently formulate research problems, design experiments, and communicate findings clearly.
• Strong problem-solving ability and willingness to work across research and engineering teams.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Hands-on experience applying computer vision algorithms to real robots, such as manipulation, mobile robots, humanoids, autonomous systems, or industrial automation.
• Experience working with real-world sensor data, including RGB/RGB-D cameras, stereo cameras, LiDAR, tactile sensors, or multi-modal sensor systems.
• Experience with robotic calibration, visual servoing, grasping, manipulation, or sim-to-real deployment.
• Contributions to open-source computer vision or robotics projects.