Principal Engineer, Physical AI

WHAT YOU DO AT AMD CHANGES EVERYTHING At AMD, our mission is to build great products that accelerate next-generation computing experiences—from AI and data centers, to PCs, gaming and embedded systems. Grounded in a culture of innovation and collaboration, we believe real progress comes from bold ideas, human ingenuity and a shared passion to create something extraordinary. When you join AMD, you’ll discover the real differentiator is our culture. We push the limits of innovation to solve the world’s most important challenges—striving for execution excellence, while being direct, humble, collaborative, and inclusive of diverse perspectives. Join us as we shape the future of AI and beyond. Together, we advance your career. The Role The Efficient AI Models and Applications team at AMD is looking for a specialized Principal Engineer who is passionate about simulation and training foundations for Physical AI. You will be a key member of the core team innovating efficient end-to-end GPU-accelerated Physical AI pipelines for simulation, synthetic data generation, and model policy training at scale.

The Person The ideal candidate has hands-on experience working on embodied AI and robot learning and can bridge the gap between high-throughput physics simulation and training Vision Language Action (VLA) Models / World Action Models (WAMs). They are passionate about enabling and innovating efficient approaches on AMD GPUs.

Why Join Us?

• Exciting Opportunities: As a senior member of the team, you will be at the forefront of innovation, working with the latest Physical AI models and algorithms. You will have the opportunity to shape the future of AI model training and inference optimizations across a variety of applications.
• Talented Team: Join a team of highly skilled industry specialists who are passionate about pushing the boundaries of AI. Collaborate with like-minded professionals and learn from the best in the field.
• Impactful Work: Your contributions will directly influence how cutting-edge foundation models for the Physical AI domain are efficiently trained and deployed at scale across the industry, making a significant difference in several industries and applications.

Key Responsibilities

• Research and implement novel, efficient VLA/WAM architectures for Physical AI models and showcase their benefits on AMD platforms.
• Demonstrate results through working proof-of-concepts and contribute your work to the open-source community.
• Increase adoption of agentic workflows for optimizing and deploying Physical AI at scale on AMD platforms.
• Influence hardware-software co-design through quantitative analysis to guide key decisions across numerical and hardware design trade-offs for future-generation AMD platforms.
• Publish and promote your work at external venues, including major conferences.
• Collaborate with researchers within AMD and across industry and academia to promote innovation on AMD platforms.

Preferred Experience

• Hands-on experience with GPU-accelerated robotics simulation and large-scale parallel-environment training: Isaac Sim/Isaac Lab, MuJoCo/MJX, Warp or Newton, Genesis.
• Demonstrated results training robot policies at scale, including reinforcement learning, imitation learning, or VLA and diffusion-policy training, with real sim-to-real transfer experience.
• GPU performance-analysis skills and experience optimizing workloads for simulation and RL training are preferred.
• Publications in conferences such as NeurIPS, CoRL, RSS, ICRA, IROS, CVPR, ICML, ICLR, etc.
• Strong technical expertise in algorithmic innovation for efficient simulation, training, and inference.
• Excellent written, verbal, and presentation skills, and the ability to zoom out and identify key trends in the industry.
• Several years of experience in robotics, GenAI, and related software development.

Academic Credentials PhD or master's degree or higher in CS, Robotics, EE, Mathematics, or a related field.

LOCATION: Markham, Ontario, Canada (Hybrid)

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Benefits offered are described: AMD benefits at a glance.

AMD does not accept unsolicited resumes from headhunters, recruitment agencies, or fee-based recruitment services. AMD and its subsidiaries are equal opportunity, inclusive employers and will consider all applicants without regard to age, ancestry, color, marital status, medical condition, mental or physical disability, national origin, race, religion, political and/or third-party affiliation, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We encourage applications from all qualified candidates and will accommodate applicants’ needs under the respective laws throughout all stages of the recruitment and selection process. AMD may use Artificial Intelligence to help screen, assess or select applicants for this position. AMD’s “Responsible AI Policy” is available here. This posting is for an existing vacancy.