Member of Technical Staff, Vision / Language

XDOF; San Mateo (CA); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health benefits

Flexible work

Collaborative culture

Impactful work

Job summary

XDOF, in San Mateo, is seeking a Research Engineer/Scientist to lead data-driven efforts at the intersection of vision-language models and robot learning. You will build systems that convert raw egocentric and teleoperation video into high-signal training data for VLMs and increasingly contribute to the models themselves.

You'll drive research into what makes robot data useful—discovering metadata and annotations to unlock cross-embodiment transfer, curriculum generation, and world models.

Qualifications

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Machine Learning or related field from a top program
• 3–7 years of research or applied research experience in vision-language models, video understanding, robot learning, or generative modeling
• Deep fluency in PyTorch and experience with distributed training, mixed precision, and large batch workflows
• Published work or demonstrable impact in VLMs/VLAs, video representation learning, imitation learning, or related areas
• Strong engineering fundamentals and ability 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 bridging vision, language, and robot action
• 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 with partner labs to define data requirements and optimize data quality for downstream policy performance
• Stay current on research frontier and translate insights into production systems

Skills

Vision-language models

PyTorch

Robot learning

Video understanding

Distributed training

Data pipelines

Research experience

Education

MS or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, ML

Tools

Large-scale training infra

Job description

About XDOF

Frontier labs are racing to build general‑purpose robots, and the bottleneck isn't compute. It's data. At XDOF, we’re building the foundation behind the foundation models: the data collection systems, annotation pipelines, exabyte‑scale data infrastructure, and software toolchain that enable our partners to push the field forward.

We’re hiring a Research Engineer / Scientist to help lead technical efforts at the intersection of vision‑language models and robot learning. You will build systems that turn raw egocentric and teleoperation video into high‑signal training data for VLA models, and increasingly, contribute to the models themselves.

Beyond pipelines, you will drive research into what makes robot data useful: discovering new metadata (contact events, affordance labels, implicit reward signals, dynamics priors from video) that unlock capabilities current approaches miss. You’ll explore how structured annotations can improve cross‑embodiment transfer, automatic curriculum generation, and world models that predict what actually matters for manipulation. The data layer isn’t downstream of the research. It is the research.

What You’ll Do

• 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

Required:

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Machine Learning, or a related field from a top‑tier program

• 3–7 years of research or applied research experience (industry or academic) in one or more of: vision‑language models, video understanding, robot learning, or generative modeling

• Deep fluency in PyTorch; working knowledge of large‑scale training infrastructure (distributed training, mixed precision, large batch workflows)

• Published work or demonstrable impact in VLMs/VLAs, video representation learning, imitation learning, or a closely related area

• Strong engineering fundamentals — you can design clean systems, not just run experiments

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and equity

• Comprehensive health and wellness benefits

• Flexible work arrangements

• Collaborative and fast‑paced work environment

• Opportunity to shape the future of robotics and AI alongside an ambitious, values‑driven team

Level: Mid Level to Senior Research Scientist (L4–L5 equivalent) Location: San Mateo

Note: Junior candidates will still be considered

If you’re excited to help build the infrastructure powering tomorrow’s intelligent machines, we’d love to hear from you!