Founding ML Scientist, Embodied AI & Robotics

Wayve; Sunnyvale (CA); Hybrid; USD 370,000 - 419,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive equity package

Job summary

Wayve is seeking a Research Scientist to join the MEGA team in Sunnyvale, CA, building foundation models for general-purpose robots. You will help define the foundation-model learning stack and collaborate across ML, robotics, and hardware teams to translate research into real-world demonstrations.

Key work includes novel architectures, pre-training objectives, and scalable training systems. The role offers hybrid work with a growing fleet of robots for evaluation and real-world impact.

Qualifications

• Experience with multimodal foundation models and data for foundation models.
• Experience with scalable training across multiple nodes and large datasets.
• Strong publication record in top-tier venues such as ICRA, CoRL, CVPR, NeurIPS, ICML or ICLR.
• Strong engineering skills and hands-on experience with modern ML frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Research and develop model architectures, learning objectives, and data strategies for robot foundation models.
• Empirical research experience – experience hill climbing on ML models.
• Experience with various data sources – annotation, filtering, mixing strategies.
• Develop scalable self-supervised and generative pre-training methods using web video, egocentric video, and robot-interaction data.
• Develop post-training approaches—including supervised fine-tuning, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and related methods—to improve real-world robot capabilities.
• Curate, filter, and evaluate large-scale robotics datasets, including egocentric, UMI, and teleoperated data.
• Build and use distributed training pipelines for large models and large multimodal datasets.
• Work closely with robotics and hardware teams to connect model progress to measurable real-world performance.

Skills

Multimodal foundation models

Scalable training

Publications in top venues

Engineering skills with ML frameworks

Experiment design

Cross-team collaboration

Communication

Education

PhD or MS in CS/ML/Robotics/Vision

Job description

Wayve is seeking a Research Scientist to join the MEGA team in Sunnyvale, CA, building foundation models for general-purpose robots. You will help define the foundation-model learning stack and collaborate across ML, robotics, and hardware teams to translate research into real-world demonstrations.

Key work includes novel architectures, pre-training objectives, and scalable training systems. The role offers hybrid work with a growing fleet of robots for evaluation and real-world impact.