AI Engineer - Reinforcement Learning (Senior)

RIVR is a Swiss robotics company pioneering Physical AI and robotic solutions to revolutionize last-mile delivery, giving 1 human the power of 1000. Through the combination of artificial neural networks and innovative robot designs with wheels and legs, RIVR aims to enhance efficiency, sustainability, and scalability in last-mile delivery. Founded as Swiss-Mile, the company rebranded to RIVR in 2025 to better reflect its mission of driving the future of intelligent robotics.

Reinforcement learning is transforming our robotic intelligence, enabling autonomous behavior without human guidance. We are seeking a Senior AI Engineer with deep expertise in reinforcement learning and deep learning, including supervised and self-supervised learning, to lead our engineering team. Your role will involve leveraging both simulated and real-world data to address practical challenges. If you are passionate about advancing AI and developing innovative solutions, join us in shaping the future of intelligent robotics.

What you’ll be doing:
• Develop cutting-edge reinforcement learning algorithms to enable robots to autonomously execute motor commands based on raw sensor input.
• Design, test, and refine your algorithms to meet the demands of complex real-world locomotion, autonomy and manipulation tasks.
• Collaborate with the computer vision and imitation learning team to innovate methods that leverage both simulated and real-world data.
• Implement deployment-ready code for the real robot, optimized for the robot’s computational constraints.
• Build, lead and mentor an exceptional team of software engineers.
• Provide expert guidance to product managers and executives for strategic decision-making.
• Create and maintain documentation, guidelines, and best practices to streamline knowledge sharing.

What you must have:
• Master’s degree or higher in a relevant field such as Engineering, Robotics, or Machine Learning.
• A minimum of five years of industry or research experience, with PhD experience applicable.
• Strong deep learning fundamentals, including supervised and self-supervised learning techniques, and reinforcement learning, including Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), neural network architectures, policy optimization algorithms, model-based vs. model-free RL, exploration-exploitation strategies, value function methods, transfer learning, domain adaptation, sim-to-real transfer, etc.
• Strong background in robotics including autonomy and/or manipulation.
• Experience with deploying artificial neural networks on hardware platforms.
• Ability to write production-level code in modern C++.
• Ability to prototype algorithms and train deep neural networks in Python.

Get some bonus points:
• PhD degree in Robotics, Engineering, Computer Science, Machine Learning or a similar discipline, or an equivalent amount of research experience.
• Publications at top-tier conferences.
• Experience in managing a software team.

RIVR is committed to building a diverse and inclusive team that values every perspective. If you’re passionate about driving innovation in robotics and creating meaningful impact, we encourage you to apply and bring your unique self to our team.

We believe the best work is done when collaborating and therefore require in-person presence in our office locations.