Role Description To help drive this mission, we are looking for a Physical AI Distributed Systems Researcher to tackle the industry's toughest challenges, including: - Enabling AI coding for distributed systems - Delivering determinism and timing control - Designing software-defined architectures - Ensuring system-wide coherence This role is an unparalleled opportunity to join our truly unique research team. RTI Research is highly regarded; our excellent record helps us win millions of dollars in funding per year. Unlike academia or other corporate research departments, RTI's team works closely with product development and field teams delivering real-world applications. If you like to take creative risks and drive innovation, knowing your cutting-edge work will actively power the future of smart distributed systems, this role is for you. What You’ll Do / Responsibilities - Innovate new solutions that will form the foundation of secure, adaptable, and fast distributed systems - Work with the business-development team to define research areas of interest and define interesting research proposal topics - Compose research proposals and report progress to research sponsors - Execute and lead research contracts to push our technology forward - Serve as Principal Investigator and/or Staff Member on externally-funded research contracts - Actively interface with research project sponsors, customers, research partners, and prospects - Develop expertise in emerging technology and share your insights across RTI - Communicate technical innovations through papers and presentations - Support the transition of promising technical innovations to product including customer trials, coordinating with product management, and working closely with the engineering team to design, develop, test and support this transition Qualifications - Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering or related field - Appropriate research expertise includes electromechanical, intelligent or autonomous systems, distributed systems, physical agentic AI, or computer networking - An experimental thesis or real-world experience with physical applications or distributed systems research - Excellent written communications skills, and evidence of research publications - Experience writing and winning proposals, and research project management - Solid programming skills and experience with AI-assisted software development - Ability to work successfully / actively engage with a highly distributed team - US Person requirement due to applicable laws, government regulations and contract specifications Benefits - Flexible working schedule - Remote working + Home Office Stipend to cover the costs of working from home - Flexible Paid Time Off + “Real Vacation Bonus,” an additional bonus for taking more than 1-week of uninterrupted vacation - Competitive compensation including annual bonus based on individual and company performance - Recognition for employee achievements and opportunities for career growth and development Company Description Real-Time Innovations (RTI) is the data-streaming company for intelligent distributed systems. RTI Connext® software is the critical nervous system for over 2,000 designs across Aerospace and Defense, MedTech, Automotive, and Robotics. RTI helps organizations develop, deploy, and scale intelligence and physical AI from edge to cloud, faster. RTI Runs a Smarter World™. Our software runs the largest power plants on the continent, connects perception to control in over 300 autonomous vehicle designs, drives the new generation of medical robotics, coordinates teams of robots, runs in over 2 million cars, manages NASA’s launch control, and underlies Canada’s air traffic control. RTI is a mid-sized company with outsized impact. RTI is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, sex, age status as a protected veteran, or status as a qualified individual with disability.

• Own and operate the AIDLC — Sphera's agentic software delivery framework that applies across all engineering, not just AI projects. • Serve as the senior technical practitioner within the AI COE — personally designing, building, and guiding AI solutions from concept through production across the portfolio. • Establish and enforce the defined delivery roles across squads — ensuring each role operates within its scope and that agentic execution is properly supervised and validated at every stage. • Drive adoption of the AIDLC operating model across engineering teams — onboarding squads, enforcing framework discipline, and intervening where teams drift toward ad-hoc approaches or accumulate governance gaps. • Create and apply AI solution evaluation frameworks — covering prompt quality, model accuracy, latency, cost, and production reliability — and monitor deployed features for drift and degradation. • Evaluate and benchmark emerging AI tools, models, and frameworks through structured experimentation, producing clear technical recommendations from hands-on testing. • Collaborate fluidly with engineering, product, InfoSec, Legal, and senior leadership, translating technical depth and business consequence depending on the audience.

• Enable scalable AI capabilities by structuring, organizing, governing, and maintaining knowledge assets • Create and sustain a centralized, reliable, and reusable knowledge base • Audit and consolidate knowledge assets to improve accessibility • Capture institutional and tribal knowledge during transition or integration • Establish governance and content architecture standards • Optimize knowledge assets for retrieval and AI enablement • Partner with stakeholders to keep knowledge current and relevant

• Design and develop interactive AI native front-end applications powered by AI Agents/LLMs • Create intuitive, AI-native user experiences that enable seamless interaction, collaboration, and control across Agentic AI systems and autonomous workflows • Partner with AI engineering / Data Science teams to integrate APIs, event driven (SSE),polling, webhooks and/or similar features • Prototype, design and implement modern Agentic UX standards, protocols and ideas , Ex. Elicitation, UX negotiation and A2UI compliant Apps • Build full stack AI Agents with Google ADK implementing advanced features like A2A, AAIF, A2UI, Agent skills, and MCP • Research and adopt modern full-stack technologies, Agentic UX innovations, and front-end best practices • Perform testing, debugging, optimization, and performance tuning to ensure high-quality user experiences • Partner with product managers, UX designers, and AI architects to translate business requirements into production-ready solutions