Principal Research Scientist, Robot Foundation Model

Wayve; Sunnyvale (CA); Hybrid; USD 407,000 - 512,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work policy

Equity package

Job summary

Wayve in Sunnyvale, CA is seeking a Principal Research Scientist to join the MEGA team as a founding member. This senior role leads architectures and data for robot foundation models and bridges research to real-world robotics applications.

You will own research directions, design scalable training, and collaborate with scientists, engineers and hardware teams to publish findings and deploy capabilities on diverse embodied AI platforms.

Qualifications

• Deep experience in machine learning with focus on vision-language models, video models, robot policies or embodied AI.
• Experience with scalable training: multi-node, large datasets or large models.
• Strong publication record in top venues (e.g., ICRA, NeurIPS, CVPR).
• Ability to lead an independent research agenda while collaborating with engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead research into architectures, data and learning approaches for robot foundation models.
• Design, implement and evaluate models for robotics foundations.
• Explore reinforcement learning and behavioural cloning for robot policies.
• Curate and filter large-scale video datasets for training and evaluation.
• Build scalable distributed training pipelines for large models and datasets.
• Influence decisions on robot policy development and data strategy.
• Collaborate with scientists and robotics teams to translate research into real-world capabilities.

Skills

Vision-language models

Video models

Robot policies

Foundation models for robotics

Embodied AI

Distributed training

Strong coding skills

Education

PhD in CS/ML/Robotics

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

ROS

Job description

About Us

Founded in 2017, Wayve is the leading developer of Embodied AI technology. Our advanced AI software and foundation models enable vehicles to perceive, understand, and navigate any complex environment, enhancing the usability and safety of automated driving systems.

Founded in 2017, Wayve is the leading developer of Embodied AI technology. Our advanced AI software and foundation models enable vehicles to perceive, understand, and navigate any complex environment, enhancing the usability and safety of automated driving systems.

Our vision is to create autonomy that propels the world forward.

Our intelligent, mapless, and hardware-agnostic AI products are designed for automakers, accelerating the transition from assisted to automated driving.

In our fast-paced environment big problems ignite us—we embrace uncertainty, leaning into complex challenges to unlock groundbreaking solutions.

We aim high and stay humble in our pursuit of excellence, constantly learning and evolving as we pave the way for a smarter, safer future.

At Wayve, your contributions matter. We value diversity, embrace new perspectives, and foster an inclusive work environment; we back each other to deliver impact.

Make Wayve the experience that defines your career!

The Role

We are looking for a Principal Research Scientist to join the Multi-Embodiment Generalist Agent (MEGA) team within Wayve Science as a founding member.

MEGA is building foundation models for general-purpose robots beyond self-driving vehicles. Our focus is on creating intelligent agents that can perceive, reason, move and manipulate the physical world across diverse embodiments, including mobile manipulators, dual-arm platforms and humanoids.

This is a senior, high-impact role with genuine 0→1 ownership. You will help define the research agenda, technical strategy and foundations of a new robotics program, working alongside world-class researchers in foundation models, embodied intelligence and large-scale machine learning.

You will have the opportunity to work across the entire robot-learning stack: building scalable data flywheels, developing new model architectures and learning algorithms, training large models, designing rigorous evaluations and deploying policies on real robots. The goal is work on compelling and publishable research, but also to turn it into systems that demonstrate increasingly general, robust and useful behavior in the physical world.

Your day-to-day work may span vision-language-action models, world and action models, multimodal and omni models, video generation, reinforcement learning, imitation learning and behavioral cloning. You will work with large-scale video and robotics datasets, distributed training infrastructure and a growing fleet of physical platforms.

You will collaborate closely with researchers, ML engineers, roboticists and hardware teams to move ambitious ideas rapidly from research hypotheses to large-scale experiments and impressive real-world capabilities.

This is a rare opportunity to help build a general robotics effort from the ground up—combining frontier foundation-model research with the immediacy and complexity of intelligence embodied in real machines.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead research into architectures, data and learning approaches for robot foundation models.
• Design, implement and evaluate models such as VLAs, WAMs, omni-modal models, video models and related foundation-model architectures for robotics.
• Explore and develop learning approaches including reinforcement learning, behavioural cloning and other methods relevant to robot policy development.
• Synthesize, curate and filter large-scale video datasets for model training and evaluation.
• Build and use scalable distributed training pipelines and infrastructure for large models and large datasets.
• Influence and/or own technical decisions around robot policy development, data strategy and model design.
• Collaborate closely with scientists, engineers and robotics teams to connect research progress to real-world robot performance.
• Communicate research clearly internally and, where appropriate, contribute to external publications and Wayve’s scientific presence.

About You

Essential

• Deep experience in machine learning, with focus in one or more of: vision-language models, video models, robot policies, foundation models for robotics or embodied AI.
• Experience with scalable training, such as multi-node training, large datasets and/or large model training.
• Strong research track record, including publications in top-tier venues such as ICRA, CoRL, CVPR, NeurIPS, ICML or ICLR.
• Strong coding skills and hands-on experience with modern machine learning frameworks.
• Ability to design and drive an independent research agenda while collaborating closely with engineering and robotics teams.
• Experience translating research ideas into working systems, experiments or deployed capabilities.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to influence technical direction across teams.

Desirable

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, Computer Vision or a related technical field.
• 5+ years of relevant industry experience.
• Experience with real robots, robotic learning, embodied AI, simulation or policy learning.
• Experience working with large-scale video data and sequential decision-making systems.
• Experience mentoring researchers or leading technical workstreams.

This role is a full-time role based in Sunnyvale, CA (hybrid) and the reasonably estimated salary for this role ranges from $407,000 to 512,000, plus a competitive equity package. Actual compensation is based on the candidate's skills, qualifications, and experience. At Wayve we want the best of all worlds so we operate a hybrid working policy that combines time together in our offices and workshops to fuel innovation, culture, relationships and learning, and time spent working from home. We operate core working hours so you can determine the schedule that works best for you and your team.

Wayve is committed to creating an inclusive interview experience. If you require any accommodations or adjustments to participate fully in our interview process, please let us know.

At Wayve we're committed to creating a diverse, fair and respectful culture that is inclusive of everyone based on their unique skills and perspectives, and regardless of sex, race, religion or belief, ethnic or national origin, disability, age, citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, pregnancy or related condition (including breastfeeding) or any other basis as protected by applicable law.

For more information visit Careers at Wayve.

To learn more about what drives us, visit Values at Wayve

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DISCLAIMER: We will not ask about marriage or pregnancy, care responsibilities or disabilities in any of our job adverts or interviews. However, we do look to capture information about care responsibilities, and disabilities among other diversity information as part of an optional DEI Monitoring form to help us identify areas of improvement in our hiring process and ensure that the process is inclusive and non-discriminatory.