Founding Research Scientist: Robot Learning & World Models

Verne; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 350,000; Full time

Job summary

Verne Robotics is seeking a Founding Research Scientist to shape robot learning research and turn promising methods into reliable manipulation skills. You’ll own projects from the initial hypothesis through model training, evaluation, and experiments on physical robots, working closely with engineering.

Responsibilities include developing world action models, designing controlled experiments, training with robot demonstrations and multimodal data, and building reproducible workflows.

Responsibilities

• Develop world action models and robot learning methods, including video-action learning, imitation learning, and reinforcement learning.
• Design controlled experiments to improve task success, generalization, robustness, and data efficiency.
• Train and post-train models on robot demonstrations and multimodal sensor data; analyze failures and identify the data needed to improve performance.
• Build reproducible training and evaluation workflows with clear baselines, metrics, ablations, and experiment records.
• Test policies on physical robots and collaborate on inference, control integration, and deployment.
• Help set research priorities and communicate results and technical tradeoffs clearly.

Job description

Verne Robotics is seeking a Founding Research Scientist to shape robot learning research and turn promising methods into reliable manipulation skills. You’ll own projects from the initial hypothesis through model training, evaluation, and experiments on physical robots, working closely with engineering.

Responsibilities include developing world action models, designing controlled experiments, training with robot demonstrations and multimodal data, and building reproducible workflows.