Glidance, Inc. Head of Embodied Intelligence Seattle, WA · Full time Company website

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At Glidance, we are creating the future of personal robotics by harnessing cutting edge robotics and AI to address actual human need and transform lives. Our flagship product, Glide, is the world’s first Intelligent Guide for individuals who are blind or have low vision, representing a new category of personal robots to enable millions of people to get out of their homes and navigate more confidently, safely, and independently. If you’re looking for a place where groundbreaking technology meets real-world impact, and where your work defines a category rather than iterates upon it, then Glidance is where you belong. This is not just your next job: it is your chance to make a life-changing impact on millions around the world.

About Glidance

At Glidance, we are building the future of autonomous wayfinding in open-world human spaces. Our mission begins with helping blind and low-vision individuals move through the world with greater confidence, safety, and independence through Glide — our autonomous mobility and guidance system. We are building embodied AI systems that operate continuously in the real world alongside people — systems that perceive, reason, plan, learn, and adapt through real-world interaction. As Glide devices are deployed into the world, each device becomes part of a growing real-world learning system — generating the pedestrian-scale perception, interaction, and environmental data required to advance autonomous navigation in human spaces.

The Role

We are looking for an exceptional AI leader to help build and lead Glidance’s frontier AI capability. You will help define the architecture, research direction, and long-term vision behind autonomous wayfinding in complex human environments while building the team and technical culture required to make that vision real. This role sits at the intersection of embodied AI, multimodal perception, vision-language systems, agentic reasoning, spatial intelligence, human-in-the-loop learning, long-horizon planning, and real-world robotic deployment.

What You’ll Do

• Define and drive Glidance’s long-term embodied AI strategy

• Build a frontier lab culture focused on rapid experimentation and real-world validation

• Recruit, mentor, and grow a world-class AI and embodied intelligence team

• Architect multimodal systems integrating perception, reasoning, planning, memory, action, and learning

• Advance state-of-the-art perception systems for complex, dynamic human environments

• Work with VLMs, multimodal foundation models, perception systems, and agentic architectures

• Develop systems capable of long-term contextual understanding and adaptive behavior

• Build infrastructure for training, evaluation, deployment, and closed-loop learning

• Work with data generated from deployed Glide systems operating in real human environments

• Collaborate closely with robotics, software, firmware, cloud, and product teams

• Deploy and iterate on models running on real robotic systems used daily by blind and low-vision users

What We’re Looking For

Required

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Machine Learning, AI, or related field

• Strong experience in embodied AI, robotics AI, multimodal AI, perception systems, agentic systems, or autonomous systems

• Strong understanding of VLMs, multimodal perception, AI agents, planning systems, and contextual reasoning architectures

• Strong software engineering capability with Python and ML frameworks such as PyTorch

• Experience leading teams, mentoring engineers or researchers, or driving large technical initiatives

Ideal Candidate

You are energized by frontier problems, ambiguity, rapid learning, and deploying systems into the real world. You care deeply about building technology that meaningfully improves people’s lives and want to help shape the future of embodied AI.

Why This Role Matters

Open-world human navigation is one of the most complex unsolved problems in robotics and AI. By deploying Glide into the world, we have the opportunity to build one of the first large-scale real-world learning systems focused on human-scale embodied intelligence — while simultaneously improving independence and mobility for blind and low-vision individuals every day. This role is an opportunity to help define the future of embodied AI itself.

Join Us

If you want to help build AI systems that intelligently operate in the real world — and shape the future of autonomous wayfinding and embodied intelligence — we’d love to talk.