ML Infra Engineer, Data Systems at Physical Intelligence (San Francisco, CA)
Physical Intelligence· San Francisco, CA·
Role details
Job description
Physical Intelligence is bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world. We are a group of engineers, scientists, roboticists, and company builders developing foundation models and learning algorithms to power the robots of today and the physically-actuated devices of the future.
As an ML Infra Engineer (Data Systems), you’ll build and operate the data infrastructure that powers large-scale robot learning. Your systems will sit directly between raw data sources and training/evaluation, enabling us to move faster while maintaining performance, correctness, and reliability at scale.
This is a systems role at the intersection of distributed systems, storage, and machine learning infrastructure.
The Team
The Infrastructure organization builds the foundations that make large-scale learning possible at PI. This includes training systems, data platforms, evaluation pipelines, and the tooling that allows researchers and roboticists to work with massive datasets safely and efficiently.
In This Role You Will
- Data Ingestion & Processing: Design and build high-throughput pipelines that validate, transform, and featurize raw multimodal data.
- Batch & Streaming Systems: Operate large-scale batch and streaming workflows over massive datasets.
- Storage Systems: Design object storage layouts, metadata systems, and efficient access patterns; choose file formats with performance and scalability in mind.
- Data Lifecycle Management: Build systems for backfills, dataset rebuilds, garbage collection, and large-scale transformations.
- Training-Time Performance: Optimize dataloaders, sharding, prefetching, caching, and throughput to reduce time from data arrival → model training.
- Metadata & Indexing: Build scalable metadata stores for datasets, annotations, and training artifacts.
- Data Movement: Move petabytes efficiently across clusters and environments.
- Operational Correctness: Implement observability, validation, and guardrails to prevent silent data regressions.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with cross-functional teams of researchers, engineers and roboticists to translate evolving data needs into robust systems.
What We Hope You’ll Bring
- Strong software engineering fundamentals.
- Experience building distributed systems or large-scale data pipelines.
- Comfort reasoning about performance, memory, I/O, and storage efficiency.
- Familiarity with batch and/or streaming processing systems.
- Experience with object storage systems and data format tradeoffs.
- Ownership mindset: design, build, operate, and iterate on systems end-to-end.
- Enjoy working closely with researchers and unblocking fast-moving projects.
Bonus Points If You Have
- Experience with large ML training pipelines or dataloading systems.
- Knowledge of columnar or custom data formats.
- Experience with systems like ClickHouse, Ray, Flink, Spark, or similar.
- Hands-on experience operating petabyte-scale datasets.
- Debugging and fixing performance bottlenecks in data-heavy systems.
Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
Why work at Physical Intelligence
- Culture: Described as a “pure company” – internally driven by research needs, not external market demands. Highly collaborative, with a mix of engineers, scientists, and roboticists working together.
- Work Environment: Hybrid/in-office – most roles require on-site presence in San Francisco (396 Treat Ave), though some remote flexibility exists. In-office setting with a “no reception” vibe, open lab space with robot stations.
- Growth: Team has scaled from ~80 (Jan 2026) to 163 (mid-2026) and is still hiring across research, ML infra, hardware, and engineering roles. Plans to grow “as slowly as possible” to maintain quality.
- Perks & Engineering Highlights: Access to cutting-edge robotics hardware and compute resources; opportunity to publish research and open-source code; exposure to a wide variety of real-world automation challenges (e.g., robots learning to fold pants, peel vegetables, make espresso). Employees come from top institutions like Berkeley, Stanford, Google, NVIDIA, and Anduril.