Research Software Engineer, Human-AI Interface

Intrinsic Flowstate (www.intrinsic.ai/flowstate) is the primary interface to the Intrinsic platform. External developers use Flowstate to create, deploy and maintain end-to-end robotics solutions. Flowstate is primarily an authoring tool; creating or editing a Flowstate solution includes authoring digital workcells, robot processes, robot skills, and hardware configurations. The Intrinsic R&D team is exploring the use of AI to generate robotics solutions from multi-modal conversational prompts. As part of this effort, we are looking for an engineer to create innovative user interfaces to generative AI for robotics. 

How your work moves the mission forward

Your work can significantly improve the accessibility of Flowstate to novice users, which can enable more users to deploy industrial robotics for manufacturing tasks. As part of your day-to-day work, you will: 

• explore and document state-of-the-art user interfaces for interacting with generative AI, specifically with large language models (LLMs),
• develop novel interface prototypes (as web applications) to generate and modify Flowstate artifacts via back-and-forth multi-modal conversations with the LLM,
• gather user feedback,  iterate on your prototypes, and identify a production-quality prototype,
• document and develop the prototype fully so it can be shipped to external users. 

In addition to delivering interfaces externally, you may also develop novel internal tools for debugging LLM-based content generation. This may include, but is not limited to, developing applications for visualizing communication between the user and LLMs, as well as tools for attributing response tokens to input tokens. 

In all the above, you will work closely with a sub-team within the R&D division, but will also frequently collaborate with other engineering, product, and UX groups within Intrinsic.

Skills you will need to be successful

• Expertise in building novel interfaces for interaction with LLMs (PhD or equivalent experience)
• Must have at least one high-quality publication in a peer-reviewed academic journal/conference
  and/or a popular open-source software package related to user interfaces
• Proficiency in full-stack software development
• Fluent in at least one of TypeScript or Python (and willingness to use both)
• Ability to design performant software using standard data structures and algorithms
• Strong desire to significantly improve the user experience of robotics in manufacturing 

Skills that will differentiate your candidacy

• Software tools that enhance human creativity, especially those designed for professional but novice users
• User studies focused on evaluating the effectiveness of novel interfaces
• Techniques or tools for debugging outputs from large language models (LLMs)
• Experience in general robotics, particularly in robotic systems for automated manufacturing (e.g., robot arms)
• Building innovative web experiences, especially those that enable interaction with and visualization of multimodal data (images, video, audio, rich text, etc.)
• Strong “product thinking” — the ability to empathize with target users and design solutions around their needs