Researcher, World Models

Menlo; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

the company Research is seeking a Researcher to advance world models central to Asimov’s perceptual, predictive, and active capabilities. You will work at the intersection of self-supervised representation learning, predictive architectures, and embodied control, collaborating with platform, firmware, and hardware teams.

You will design and evaluate world models, advance self-supervised stacks, prototype revolutionary architectures, and own end-to-end data workflows, ensuring the research

Qualifications

• Proven modeling track record.
• JEPA fluency and ability to reason about joint-embedding predictive approaches.
• Breadth across vision-language-action models and trade-offs.
• Depth in at least one modality (vision, audio, language, etc.).
• Strong data capabilities and ability to operate without a full data-engineering team.
• Solid engineering; able to implement, integrate, and ship research with platform teams.

Responsibilities

• Design, train, and evaluate world models for predicting action consequences across visual, proprioceptive, and force/torque modalities.
• Advance self-supervised learning for visual and sensor representations.
• Prototype and benchmark generative/predictive architectures (diffusion, DiT, flow matching, VAEs) against JEPA objectives.
• Own the data pipeline end-to-end: curation, tooling, scaling.
• Integrate research outputs with platform, firmware, and software teams to deploy to the robot.
• Contribute to sim-to-real transfer, inverse dynamics, and publish/open-source work as appropriate.

Skills

World models

Self-supervised

JEPA

Vision fusion

PyTorch

JAX

Tools

Diffusion

DiT

Flow matching

VAEs

Job description

About the company

the company Research is an Applied R&D lab building Asimov, an open-source humanoid robot platform, and the full software stack that powers it. Our mission is to make humanoid labor economically viable, turning software into physical labor at scale. We build across the full stack: hardware architecture, locomotion, autonomy, simulation, and infrastructure. We move fast, ship to real robots, and open-source everything we can. If you want your work to matter beyond a paper or a demo, this is the place.

The Role

We are hiring a Researcher to advance the world models at the core of Asimov's ability to perceive, predict, and act. You will work at the intersection of self-supervised representation learning, predictive architectures, and embodied control, in close collaboration with our platform, firmware, and hardware teams.

What You'll Do

• Design, train, and rigorously evaluate world models that let Asimov predict the consequences of actions across visual, proprioceptive, and force/torque modalities.

• Advance our self-supervised learning stack for visual and sensor representations, building on and extending the JEPA family (V-JEPA, I-JEPA, and related predictive-embedding approaches).

• Prototype and benchmark generative and predictive architectures (diffusion, DiT, flow matching, VAEs) against JEPA-style objectives for embodied prediction and planning.

• Own the data pipeline for your experiments end to end: curation, tooling, and scaling, without depending on a separate data-engineering team to move.

• Integrate what you build with our platform, firmware, and software teams so research reaches the robot, not just the paper.

• Contribute to sim-to-real transfer, inverse dynamics, and multi-modal sensor fusion, and publish or open-source work where it strengthens the field and the team.

What We Look For

• Proven modeling track record: you have trained models and can show solid, honest evaluations, not just training curves.

• JEPA fluency: you understand the joint-embedding predictive approach and can reason about where it fits versus alternatives.

• Breadth across approaches: familiarity with prior and adjacent work, including VLA (vision-language-action) models, and a view on their trade-offs.

• Depth in a modality: strong depth in at least one sensory domain (vision, audio, natural language, or similar).

• Strong data abilities: you get things done without depending on a whole data-engineering team.

• Solid engineering: you can implement, integrate, and ship what you build alongside platform, firmware, and software teams.

• Conversant, ideally deep, in several of: SSL for visual and sensor representations; world models (JEPA, V-JEPA, I-JEPA, LeJEPA, MJEPA); generative and predictive architectures (diffusion, DiT, flow matching, VAEs); robotics ML (VLA, inverse dynamics, sim-to-real, optical flow); sensor fusion (vision, proprioception, force/torque, multi-modal encoders); PyTorch, JAX, and distributed training.

Nice to Have

• Publications at NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CoRL, or RSS (or arXiv work with comparable citations).

• PhD or equivalent research experience in ML, robotics, or computer vision. Not required with a strong portfolio.

• Demonstrated hardware or robotics interest or hands-on experience.

• Strong communication: technical blogs, talks, or clear written research.

Why Join the company

World models are the bet that lets a humanoid generalize instead of memorize. This is a rare seat where your research runs on real hardware in short cycles, your data and modeling choices are yours to own, and your work ships in the open. If you want the distance between an idea and a walking robot to be measured in weeks, this is the room.

A Note on AI

You don't need deep AI expertise for every role, but we do expect everyone at the company to be intellectually curious, drawn to tinkering and discovery, and excited to use AI as a real collaborator in their work. For some roles, AI fluency is a core requirement. When that's the case, we'll say so explicitly in the qualifications. People who thrive here don't treat AI as a novelty. They use it to think better, and make their work easier for others to build on.

Equal Opportunity and Accommodations

We hire talented people from a wide range of backgrounds. If you're excited about a role but don't meet every bullet, we still encourage you to apply. the company Research is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of any legally protected characteristic. the company provides reasonable accommodations during the application process. If you need one, please let your recruiter know.