Helix AI Engineer, Perception
Figure · San Jose, CA
$200,000–$400,000from the description
Jul 21, 2026
San Jose, CA
Jul 22, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A perception engineering role focused on building and deploying vision and autonomy systems for a general-purpose humanoid robot. Day-to-day work spans onboard computer vision, localization, visuomotor policies, and data annotation pipelines, with ownership across the full lifecycle from concept through real-world deployment. Suited to engineers with strong ML and production software backgrounds and depth in areas such as 3D vision, SLAM, or vision-language models.
Senior level · San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 1,350 people in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 560–2,000
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
What the occupation pays Median $217,796 (middle half $177,469–$231,052). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (6)
The role sits at the intersection of software engineering and ML/robotics research; 15-2051 (Data Scientists) is a plausible runner-up given the heavy ML and mathematical modeling emphasis, but the primary deliverable is production perception software shipped on a physical robot, which aligns more closely with Software Developers.
The domain expertise requirement lists four interchangeable specializations (3D Vision, VIO/SLAM, VLM, Diffusion Models) — candidates need depth in at least one, so they are captured as a single skill with alternatives.
No overall years-of-experience figure is stated; 'extensive experience' is qualitative and not mapped to a number.
The posting is titled 'Perception Engineer' with no seniority modifier, but the scope (end-to-end product ownership, production-grade systems, extensive experience) supports a Senior classification.
Spark and Ray appear under the Bonus Qualifications section as examples of 'scalable data engineering toolchains'; Spark is the primary name with Ray as an alternative since they serve the same distributed-compute function in this context.
Ignored 1 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): ML engineering.
Read the full posting
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