韩国三大集团SI子公司争抢Physical AI机器人人才，RaaS被视为下一增长引擎

Competition for robotics specialists is heating up among system integration units of South Korea's large business groups. Demand for such talent is rising as robots-as-a-service, or RaaS, in which companies pay a fee to deploy and use robots, emerges as a core business. At the same time, the pool of robotics professionals in Korea is small, and the fight to recruit engineers with hands-on field experience is expected to intensify.
LG CNS, Hyundai AutoEver and Lotte Innovate are all recruiting experienced engineers in physical artificial intelligence, according to industry sources on the 26th. LG CNS is hiring robot hardware and software developers as well as physical AI scientists.
The openings also include safety engineers, who handle safety design, validation and certification so that robots can operate securely alongside human workers on factory floors. The move reflects an intent to carry out certification procedures required to deploy robots at actual sites not only in Korea but also in Europe and North America.
Hyundai AutoEver is targeting specialists in robot platforms and data. The company wants to build systems that collect, process and store data generated at robot manufacturing plants and operating sites, and to design a central control system that manages multiple robots in an integrated manner. The hiring is seen as an effort to recruit experts who can upgrade related systems with the deployment of Atlas, the humanoid robot developed by Boston Dynamics, in mind.
Lotte Innovate, which recently formed a physical AI task force, has posted openings for experienced engineers to join the team. The roles range from imitation learning and reinforcement learning to the development of vision-language-action, or VLA, models that generate robot behavior based on video and language, as well as performance validation through simulation.
The hiring push comes as the RaaS business is seen as the next growth engine for system integration companies. As technological advances bring robots into factories in earnest, demand is expected to grow from companies that want to buy robots on a subscription basis and then receive system integration, unified control and maintenance services. For system integrators, that means recurring revenue from subscription and operating fees after the initial build-out.
The difficulty lies in finding the people. In a survey of Korean companies conducted by the Korea Industrial Technology Association in March this year, 58.2% said they lacked the specialists needed to respond to physical AI. By company size, 66.7% of large and mid-sized firms and 57.7% of smaller firms reported a shortage of specialists. "There are not many doctoral-level graduates who majored in robotics in Korea, and few schools have hands-on robotics facilities," one industry official said. "So we are looking for people with a master's degree who have developed robots at a startup, but even that is not easy."
Another industry official stressed that domain knowledge matters as much as engineering credentials. "The robot system integration business requires not only the technical experience of building and operating an integrated control platform but also an understanding of the business environment," the official said. "Securing people with deep domain knowledge needed to apply robots in the field and a high level of understanding of robot technology will become the company's competitive edge."