Senior / Staff AI Research Scientist, Foundation Models

Job description

**Why RoboForce** RoboForce is an AI robotics company developing Physical AI–powered Robo-Labor for dull, dirty, and dangerous work. The company's robots are engineered for demanding industrial environments, with a focus on real-world deployment and scalability. We are looking for a **Senior / Staff AI Research Scientist, Foundation Models** to advance robotic embodied intelligence. In this role, you will develop algorithms that enable robots to understand their environment, interpret and execute tasks, and communicate seamlessly with humans — with a particular focus on building and training world models that allow robots to predict, plan, and generalize across complex physical tasks. **Responsibilities** - Design and deploy vision-language(-action) models (VLM/VLA) for contextual understanding and generalized robot action policies. - Develop and train world models for action-conditioned prediction, long-horizon planning, and environment simulation — enabling robots to reason about the consequences of their actions before execution. - Research approaches to improve world model fidelity using multi-modal inputs including vision, language, proprioception, and spatial representations. - Develop foundation models with spatial reasoning capabilities to achieve high-precision robotic actions. - Integrate multi-modal data sources (vision, language, speech, etc.) to enable natural human-robot communication. - Optimize and deploy models as production-grade solutions on RoboForce robotic platforms. **Requirements** - PhD degree in Machine Learning, Robotics, or related field, or Master's degree with 4+ years of relevant experience. - Proficiency in Python and deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, JAX). - Expertise in large foundation models (VLM, VLA, etc.). - Strong understanding of world model architectures and action-conditioned generative modeling for robot learning. - Decent understanding of multimodal models, modern ML architectures (transformers, diffusion models, etc.). - **Requires 5 days/week in-office collaboration with the teams.** **Bonus Qualifications** - Experience with video generation or prediction models (e.g., diffusion-based video models, autoregressive video transformers) and their application to world modeling or synthetic data generation for robot learning. - Strong publication record at top conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ICCV, CoRL, ICRA, or equivalent). - Expertise in neural network deployment (e.g., TensorRT) and GPU programming with CUDA. - Proven ability to design scalable experimentation and data pipelines. **Benefits** - Competitive stock options/equity programs. - Health, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k) plan. - Visa sponsorship and green card support for qualified candidates. - Lunches and dinners, a fully stocked kitchen, and regular team-building events. Compensation: Salary $200,000–$360,000 USD + Bonus + Equity The base salary range above represents the expected compensation for this full-time U.S. position. Final compensation will be determined based on role scope, level, location, job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training, and may fall outside the listed range in exceptional cases.