Research Scientist

Roboflow, Inc.; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 250,000 - 450,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Travel stipends

Health insurance coverage

Unlimited PTO

Parental leave (12 weeks)

Job summary

Roboflow is seeking a Research Scientist for Roboflow Labs in San Francisco to work at the intersection of benchmarks, models, and frontier labs, running failure analyses and turning those findings into data and evaluation specs.

You will publish, extend RF100-VL, contribute to open models, and collaborate with researchers to translate roadmaps into concrete data programs that move real-world numbers.

Qualifications

• PhD or equivalent research experience in computer vision, multi-modal learning, machine learning, or related field.
• Hands-on experience with post-training: fine-tuning, RL, evaluation design, or data curation for large models.
• Strong engineering fundamentals and ability to turn experiments into production-ready code.
• Clear written communication; explain failures to researchers and data specs to annotators.
• Nice to have: frontier lab experience or data/evaluation partnership with one; vision-language or robotics experience.

Responsibilities

• Design datasets, evaluations, and RL environments for vision-language, multi-modal, robotics, and coding models.
• Run structured failure analyses on partner labs' models and write remediation specs to close gaps.
• Own the research behind new benchmarks and publish findings.
• Validate data quality with fine-tuning, ablation, and measurement to back dataset claims.
• Contribute to Roboflow's open models and represent Labs in the research community.
• Collaborate with frontier labs to translate model roadmaps into concrete data programs.

Skills

Fine-tuning

Evaluation design

Data curation

Clear communication

frontier labs experience

Education

PhD or equivalent research in ML/vision

Job description

Who We Are

Roboflow is building the visual cortex for AGI.

Every day, millions of developers and half of the Fortune 100 use Roboflow to count cells to accelerate cancer research, improve construction site safety, digitize floor plans, preserve coral reef populations, guide drone flight, and much more.

We have built the tools, community, and resources needed to make the world programmable with artificial intelligence. We're supported by great customers and investors, having raised over $100 million from Google Ventures, Craft Ventures, Sam Altman, Lachy Groom, Y Combinator, and more.

Roboflow Labs is our applied research unit. We train our own open models (RF-DETR). We build our own benchmarks grounded in real enterprise use cases (RF100-VL). And we partner with frontier labs to deliver the training data they need to advance the capabilities that drive the most value back to our customers.

Behind all of it is a global network of millions of Roboflow developers who have annotated billions of images and videos to date, as well as a proven enterprise business that is exploding as AI traverses the physical economy.

What You'll Do

As a Research Scientist at Roboflow Labs, you'll sit at the intersection of our benchmarks, our models, and the researchers at frontier labs who buy our data: running failure analyses that show exactly where a model breaks on real-world tasks, turning those findings into dataset and evaluation specifications, and validating that the data we ship actually moves the numbers. You'll publish, extend RF100-VL and the benchmarks that follow it, and help set the research agenda for a team whose work is grounded in millions of real deployments rather than fabricated test sets.

• Design datasets, evaluations, and RL environments that target measurable gaps in frontier vision-language, multi-modal, robotics, and coding models

• Run structured failure analyses on partner labs' models against Roboflow's real-world task distribution and write the remediation specs that say what data will close each gap

• Own the research behind new benchmarks that we publish.

• Validate data quality empirically — fine-tune, ablate, and measure so that every dataset we sell comes with evidence it works

• Contribute to Roboflow's open models (RF-DETR and successors) and represent Labs within the research community

• Work directly with research scientists at frontier labs as a technical peer, translating their model roadmaps into concrete data programs

Who You Are

You are a researcher who wants to see your work turn into data that ships. You have high agency and a bias toward action.

• PhD or equivalent research experience in computer vision, multi-modal learning, machine learning, or a closely related field, with a track record of published work or shipped research

• Hands-on experience with post-training: fine-tuning, RL, evaluation design, or data curation for large models

• Strong engineering fundamentals — you write the code for your own experiments and can hand it to an engineer to productionize

• Clear written communication; you can explain a failure mode to a lab researcher and a data spec to an annotator

• Nice to have: experience at a frontier lab or as a data/evaluation partner to one; experience with vision-language models, robotics learning, or agentic coding evaluations

Where You'll Work

Roboflow is a fully distributed company with hubs in San Francisco, New York City, Singapore, and Brazil. Roboflow Labs works in person in San Francisco. We host full company retreats twice per year.

What You'll Receive

The target compensation for this role is $250,000 – $450,000 base salary commensurate with experience as well as equity in the company. Total cash comp is expected to scale significantly with growth of Roboflow Labs.

In addition, we offer generous perks and benefits. Below are some of the highlights:

• Generous stipends covering travel, productivity, tools, meals, and office.

• Up to 100% of your health insurance costs covered.

• Unlimited PTO - with an annual 2 week minimum.

• 12 weeks parental leave

Not sure if this is you?

We want a diverse, global team with a broad range of experience and perspectives. We carefully consider every application and will either move forward with you, find another team that might be a better fit, keep in touch for future opportunities, or thank you for your time.

Learn More About Us

At Roboflow, we believe great ideas come from everywhere, and everyone. We’re proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. We consider all qualified applicants regardless of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, age, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristics.