Lead Research Scientist: Vision AI & Embodied Intelligence

Centific Global Solutions, Inc.; United States; Hybrid; USD 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Centific is seeking a Lead Research Scientist to define and drive a research agenda in Vision AI, multimodal foundation models, and embodied intelligence. You will lead a small team of researchers and engineers, shaping model design, large-scale training, and evaluation in collaboration with industry partners.

The role requires a Ph.D., a strong publication record, and 5+ years in advanced R&D. You will mentor junior researchers, contribute to IP, and help translate frontier research into

Qualifications

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, Robotics, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Autonomous Systems, or a related field.
• Strong publication record in top venues such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CoRL, RSS, or leading autonomous driving/robotics venues.
• 5+ years of research experience in academia, industry, or advanced R&D environments.
• Demonstrated experience building or advancing large-scale foundational models, novel architectures, or training methods in multimodal AI, vision, robotics, autonomous driving, embodied AI, world models, or simulation-based learning.
• Deep expertise in PyTorch and/or JAX, GPU training, distributed experimentation, and large-scale model development.
• Proven ability to lead ambitious technical programs and mentor junior researchers.

Responsibilities

• Lead high-impact research in multimodal foundation models, world models, embodied AI, vision-language-action systems, and agentic AI.
• Develop new approaches for perception, temporal reasoning, spatial intelligence, affordance understanding, autonomous decision-making, and sim2real transfer.
• Advance robotics capabilities including dexterous manipulation, contact-rich interaction, bimanual coordination, long-horizon task execution, navigation in dynamic environments, and robust action under uncertainty.
• Contribute to large-scale model building, including multimodal pretraining, distributed training, fine-tuning, distillation, and evaluation of models for vision, robotics, and autonomous systems.
• Help shape research relevant to autonomous driving and mobile autonomy, including scene understanding, multimodal sensor reasoning, planning-aware perception, and edge-case robustness.
• Guide integration of research with simulation and digital twin platforms such as Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, MuJoCo, Omniverse, or related environments.
• Establish rigorous benchmarks and reproducible evaluation frameworks for robustness, safety, generalization, manipulation success, policy performance, and real-world deployment readiness.
• Mentor Ph.D. interns and engineers, and help build a strong research culture grounded in rigor, speed, originality, and scientific excellence.

Skills

Ph.D. in CS/ML/Robotics

Strong publication record

5+ years research experience

Foundational models (multimodal)

PyTorch & JAX

Leadership & mentorship

Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science / Robotics / ML / CV / Autonomous Systems

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

Ray

Docker

Kubernetes

Triton

Job description

Centific is seeking a Lead Research Scientist to define and drive a research agenda in Vision AI, multimodal foundation models, and embodied intelligence. You will lead a small team of researchers and engineers, shaping model design, large-scale training, and evaluation in collaboration with industry partners.

The role requires a Ph.D., a strong publication record, and 5+ years in advanced R&D. You will mentor junior researchers, contribute to IP, and help translate frontier research into