Research Scientist (Vision-Language Models and Robot Learning)

Location: San Mateo, United States; hybrid

Salary: $180,000–$300,000 base salary annually; equity offered

Company

Builds data collection systems, annotation pipelines, large-scale data infrastructure, and software tools for robotics foundation models.

What you will do

• Lead an exploratory research project on the data required for models to reason about and act in the physical world.
• Study how frontier models fail on embodied tasks and form hypotheses about structured annotations for egocentric video.
• Prototype annotation approaches on collected data and run experiments to evaluate their impact.
• Develop and evaluate representations connecting visual perception, language, and low-level robot action across modalities.
• Collaborate directly with partner labs to define data requirements and connect data quality with downstream policy performance.
• Track research in VLAs, video foundation models, flow matching, DiT architectures, and egocentric pretraining, applying findings to research and production systems.

Requirements

• PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Machine Learning, or a related field from a top-tier program.
• 3–7 years of research or applied research experience in industry or academia in one or more of vision-language models, video understanding, robot learning, or generative modeling.
• Deep fluency in PyTorch.
• Working knowledge of large-scale training infrastructure, including distributed training, mixed precision, and large-batch workflows.
• Published work or demonstrable impact in VLMs/VLAs, video representation learning, imitation learning, or a closely related area.
• Strong engineering fundamentals and the ability to design clean systems, not only run experiments.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work in San Mateo.
• Equity offered in addition to base salary.
• Direct collaboration with partner research labs.