Principal Research Scientist, Robotic Foundation Models

EngineersOfAI; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Wayve is seeking a Principal Research Scientist to join the MEGA team, building foundation models for general-purpose robots. You will define the research agenda, set technical strategy, and lead a robotics program from the ground up, working with researchers, ML engineers, and hardware teams to translate theory into real-world robotic capabilities.

You will explore vision-language-action models, world and action models, multimodal approaches, and large-scale training, with an emphasis on

Qualifications

• Senior, high-impact role with genuine 0-1 ownership.
• Experience defining research agenda and strategy for robotics.

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 for robotics.
• Explore learning approaches including reinforcement learning and behavioural cloning for robot policy.
• Synthesize and filter large-scale video datasets for training and evaluation.
• Build scalable distributed training pipelines for large models and datasets.
• Collaborate with scientists, engineers and robotics teams to deploy real-world capabilities.
• Publish findings and contribute to Wayve’s scientific presence.

Job description

Wayve is seeking a Principal Research Scientist to join the MEGA team, building foundation models for general-purpose robots. You will define the research agenda, set technical strategy, and lead a robotics program from the ground up, working with researchers, ML engineers, and hardware teams to translate theory into real-world robotic capabilities.

You will explore vision-language-action models, world and action models, multimodal approaches, and large-scale training, with an emphasis on