Research Member of Technical Staff - Data & Evaluation

Roboticsconnected; Mountain View (WY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Rhoda AI is seeking researchers to build the data and evaluation foundations for its video action model. You will design scalable data pipelines, annotate data, and develop evaluation methodologies to measure model progress and downstream robot task performance.

The role spans from data curation to benchmarking, with opportunities to influence data quality, model selection, and research strategy across teams.

Qualifications

• Strong understanding of data-centric ML and how web video data quality affects large generative model performance.
• Experience building large-scale video data pipelines: ingestion, filtering, deduplication, and quality scoring.
• Familiarity with video-specific data characteristics: temporal structure, motion quality, scene diversity, and action content.
• Solid ML fundamentals with hands-on experience training or evaluating large generative models.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement scalable curation pipelines for web-scale video pretraining data: ingestion, deduplication, quality filtering, and content classification across internet-scale video corpora
• Develop video-specific annotation frameworks and quality filters — motion quality, scene diversity, action content, temporal coherence — to improve pretraining signal
• Build evaluation frameworks and benchmarks to measure causal video model capabilities: prediction quality, temporal coherence, long-horizon rollout fidelity, and downstream robot task performance
• Research and implement data selection, mixing, and weighting strategies that improve video generation quality and transfer to robotic control
• Deploy and scale vision-language models (VLMs) and video understanding models for automated annotation, filtering, and content scoring at web scale
• Collaborate closely with pre-training and post-training teams to ensure data quality and evaluation methodology drive research decisions
• Track model capability trends across training runs, catching regressions and surfacing improvements early

Skills

Data-centric ML

Video pipelines

Video generation models

Evaluation frameworks

Collaboration

Tools

VLMs

CLIP-style inference

Job description

At Rhoda AI, we’re building the next generation of generalist intelligent robots. We own the full robotics stack from high-performance hardware and robot systems to the infrastructure and state-of-the-art foundation world models that control our robots. Our robots are designed to be generalists capable of operating in complex, real-world environments and handling long-tail edge cases, made possible by our cutting edge research and end-to-end system design. We've raised over $450M and are investing aggressively in model research, infrastructure, hardware development, and manufacturing scale-up to make generalist robotics a reality.

We're looking for Research Scientists and Research Engineers to build the data and evaluation foundations for our video action model. This team owns web-scale video data curation, annotation pipelines, and evaluation methodology — directly determining the quality of the video pretraining distribution and how clearly we can measure model progress. We hire across levels — from MTS-Staff

What You'll Do

• Design and implement scalable curation pipelines for web-scale video pretraining data: ingestion, deduplication, quality filtering, and content classification across internet-scale video corpora
• Develop video-specific annotation frameworks and quality filters — motion quality, scene diversity, action content, temporal coherence — to improve pretraining signal
• Build evaluation frameworks and benchmarks to measure causal video model capabilities: prediction quality, temporal coherence, long-horizon rollout fidelity, and downstream robot task performance
• Research and implement data selection, mixing, and weighting strategies that improve video generation quality and transfer to robotic control
• Deploy and scale vision-language models (VLMs) and video understanding models for automated annotation, filtering, and content scoring at web scale
• Collaborate closely with pre-training and post-training teams to ensure data quality and evaluation methodology drive research decisions
• Track model capability trends across training runs, catching regressions and surfacing improvements early

What We're Looking For

• Strong understanding of data-centric ML and how web video data quality affects large generative model performance
• Experience building large-scale video data pipelines: ingestion, filtering, deduplication, and quality scoring
• Familiarity with video-specific data characteristics: temporal structure, motion quality, scene diversity, and action content
• Solid ML fundamentals with hands‑on experience training or evaluating large generative models
• Ability to design evaluations for video generation models that are diagnostic, reproducible, and actionable
• Staff-level candidates are expected to define technical direction and drive research strategy independently; senior/MTS candidates execute complex projects with strong fundamentals and growing scope

Nice to Have (But Not Required)

• PhD or strong research background in ML, computer vision, or a related field
• Experience with large-scale web video dataset curation (e.g., WebVid, HowTo100M, Ego4D, or similar)
• Familiarity with video generation quality metrics (FVD, perceptual quality, motion consistency)
• Experience running VLM or CLIP-style inference at scale for automated video filtering and annotation
• Prior work on evaluation methodology for video generation or world models
• Understanding of how web video data properties connect to downstream robotic action prediction
• Publication record at NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, or related venues

Why This Role

• The video curation and evaluation rigor you build directly determines pretraining quality and research iteration speed for the entire team
• Build the benchmark infrastructure that gives the team an honest signal of model progress toward real robot performance
• High leverage: improvements to data quality compound across every training run
• Work at the intersection of large-scale systems and generative model research with visibility across all model development