careerladder.fyi › Career paths › Physical Intelligence
How people got jobs at Physical Intelligence
What 47 people did before they joined Physical Intelligence: where they worked, what they studied, which role they came in through, and how long it took.
47
people in our data got there
74%
had a graduate degree first (of those listing one)
10
typical years since first job
- The most common step right before: from other companies (60%).
- The most common way in was Member of technical staff (49% joined in that kind of role).
- Of those who list their education, 74% had a graduate degree before arriving and 32% a PhD.
- The typical person arrived about 10 years after their first job.
- The most common earlier employer: Google (21% had worked there).
How Physical Intelligence compares
- 32% had a PhD, above the 19% across other frontier AI labs, the 3rd-highest of the 19 in our data.
- 74% had a graduate degree, above the 66% across other frontier AI labs.
- People arrived about 4 years earlier in their careers than at the typical one of the other frontier AI labs (10 vs 13 years since their first job).
Among people who list their education; places with at least 10 such people.
Show as a table
| People listing education | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| Google DeepMind | 58 | 41% |
| World Labs | 39 | 33% |
| Physical Intelligence (this page) | 31 | 32% |
| Sakana AI | 41 | 29% |
| Cohere | 40 | 28% |
| Hugging Face | 34 | 24% |
| Stability AI | 40 | 22% |
| SpaceXAI | 17 | 18% |
| Thinking Machines Lab | 29 | 17% |
| OpenAI | 41 | 17% |
| Anthropic | 28 | 14% |
| Black Forest Labs | 32 | 12% |
| EleutherAI | 26 | 12% |
| Reflection | 20 | 10% |
| Mistral AI | 36 | 8% |
| Skild AI | 39 | 8% |
| Poolside | 31 | 6% |
| Cognition | 27 | 4% |
| Perplexity | 24 | <1% |
Show as a table
| Median years | ||
|---|---|---|
| SpaceXAI | 18 yrs | |
| Anthropic | 15 yrs | |
| Mistral AI | 15 yrs | |
| OpenAI | 14 yrs | |
| Perplexity | 14 yrs | |
| Reflection | 14 yrs | |
| Thinking Machines Lab | 14 yrs | |
| Stability AI | 14 yrs | |
| Poolside | 13 yrs | |
| Cognition | 13 yrs | |
| Cohere | 13 yrs | |
| Black Forest Labs | 10 yrs | |
| Physical Intelligence (this page) | 10 yrs | |
| Google DeepMind | 10 yrs | |
| Sakana AI | 9 yrs | |
| Skild AI | 9 yrs | |
| World Labs | 8 yrs | |
| Hugging Face | 8 yrs | |
| EleutherAI | 5 yrs |
Which role they joined in
Kinds of role with fewer than 5 people are combined into "All other roles".
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| Member of technical staff | 23 | 49% |
| Business & operations | 8 | 17% |
| All other roles | 10 | 21% |
| Founder general mgmt | 6 | 13% |
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| Member of Technical Staff | 22 | 47% |
| Co-Founder | 5 | 11% |
What they did right before
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| From other companies | 28 | 60% |
| From Big Tech | 8 | 17% |
| From frontier AI labs | 7 | 15% |
| Other | 4 | 9% |
Where they worked before
A person can count under more than one employer.
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| 10 | 21% | |
| Microsoft | 6 | 13% |
| Meta | 6 | 13% |
| Tesla | 5 | 11% |
| Stanford University | 5 | 11% |
Education
Among the 31 of 47 people who list their education.
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| Bachelor's | 8 | 26% |
| Master's | 12 | 39% |
| MBA | 1 | 3% |
| PhD | 10 | 32% |
How much experience they had
Among the 47 of 47 people with an earlier job listed.
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| 1-3 years | 1 | 2% |
| 3-5 years | 5 | 11% |
| 5-8 years | 6 | 13% |
| 8-12 years | 21 | 45% |
| 12+ years | 14 | 30% |
Where would your path lead?
Paste your LinkedIn or resume and see the ladders people like you climbed to Physical Intelligence, and how each step changes your chances.
Plan my path to Physical Intelligence →
Paste your LinkedIn or resume and see the ladders people like you climbed to Physical Intelligence, and how each step changes your chances.
Plan my path to Physical Intelligence →
Related
How these numbers are made. From 3k+ public career histories collected for careerladder.fyi (dated jobs, degrees and publications). The collection was built around particular employers, so people who reached well-known tech, AI and finance employers are over-represented: read shares as "among people in this dataset", not as hiring odds. Names are shown only when at least 5 people are behind them; smaller groups are combined into "Other". No individual profile is shown. Updated November 2026.