Staff Scientist - Vision-Language Robotics & Data Systems

XDOF; San Mateo; On-site; PHP 8,822,000 - 14,493,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Flexible work

Collaborative team

Impactful work

Job summary

XDOF is seeking a Mid to Senior Research Scientist to design and implement vision-language pipelines for egocentric and teleoperation video, bridging perception, language, and robot action. You will develop scalable representations and data systems while collaborating with partner labs to ensure data quality drives policy performance.

The role emphasizes publishing impact, clean software engineering, and hands-on work with high-DoF manipulation data, with opportunities to shape the data

Qualifications

• MS or PhD in CS/Robotics/ML from a top-tier program.
• 3–7 years of research or applied research in vision-language models, video understanding, robot learning, or generative modeling.
• Deep fluency in PyTorch; working knowledge of distributed training infrastructure, mixed precision, large-batch workflows.
• Published work or demonstrable impact in VLMs/VLAs, video representation learning, imitation learning, or related areas.
• Strong engineering fundamentals — able to design clean systems, not just run experiments.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement vision-language pipelines for egocentric and teleoperation video: structured captioning, temporal grounding, action-conditioned scene understanding, and semantic annotation at scale.
• Develop and evaluate representations that bridge visual perception, language, and low-level robot action — spanning VLAs, video prediction, and world models.
• Build and improve data curation systems that assess quality, diversity, and coverage of large-scale robot demonstration datasets.
• Work hands-on with bimanual and high-DoF manipulation data, including real teleoperation footage and sim-generated rollouts.
• Collaborate directly with partner labs to define data requirements and close the loop between data quality and downstream policy performance.
• Stay current on the research frontier (VLAs, video foundation models, flow matching, DiT architectures, egocentric pretraining) and translate insights into production systems.

Skills

PyTorch

VL models

Video understanding

Robot learning

Generative modeling

Education

MS or PhD in CS/Robotics/ML

Job description

XDOF is seeking a Mid to Senior Research Scientist to design and implement vision-language pipelines for egocentric and teleoperation video, bridging perception, language, and robot action. You will develop scalable representations and data systems while collaborating with partner labs to ensure data quality drives policy performance.

The role emphasizes publishing impact, clean software engineering, and hands-on work with high-DoF manipulation data, with opportunities to shape the data