Interpretable AI Research Scientist

World Mechanics; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 250,000 - 400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Job summary

World Mechanics is seeking a Research Scientist to advance interpretable foundation models for physical systems. You will build tooling, run experiments, and help turn insights into deployable capabilities across video, sensor, and multimodal data.

This role emphasizes empirical rigor, collaboration with customers, and publishing open-source artifacts; equity is offered, and you will work at the intersection of research and product.

Qualifications

• Strong ML research ability with demonstrated execution (papers, strong open-source, or substantial internal research impact).
• Fluency in deep learning fundamentals and the ability to prototype quickly and iterate empirically.
• Comfort working in ambiguity: you can pick good bets, run clean experiments, and update quickly.
• Strong communication and epistemic humility; you like productive debate without ideology or politics.
• Interest in commercialization and product pull; you care whether the research becomes a real capability.

Responsibilities

• Build interpretability tooling and experiments to find, test, and validate internal representations in physical AI models (e.g., motion, dynamics, object permanence, latent system state).
• Design "white-box evaluation" methods: detect internal failure signatures, trace model errors to representations/computations, and create actionable diagnostics.
• Contribute to interpretability-informed training loops (train → discover structure → evaluate → incorporate → repeat), turning interpretability discoveries into training signals or inductive biases.
• Work across video, sensor, time-series, and other multimodal data, and help determine what useful representations look like across physical and industrial systems.
• Collaborate with the team (and with customers!) to ensure research stays grounded in real deployment constraints and commercial value.
• Work toward publications at top conferences and journals, and publish open-source artifacts from our research agenda when aligned with our commercial and customer goals.

Skills

ML research

Deep learning

Experimentation

Communication

Ambiguity handling

Job description

World Mechanics is seeking a Research Scientist to advance interpretable foundation models for physical systems. You will build tooling, run experiments, and help turn insights into deployable capabilities across video, sensor, and multimodal data.

This role emphasizes empirical rigor, collaboration with customers, and publishing open-source artifacts; equity is offered, and you will work at the intersection of research and product.