Senior Member of Technical Staff: Multimodal Post-Training

Walden Robotics; Cambridge (MA); On-site; USD 250,000 - 400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Salary + bonus

Equity

401(k) with company match

Flexible PTO

Daily lunch

Job summary

Walden Robotics seeks a senior technical leader to guide how foundation models become capable, aligned robot policies. You will drive SFT, RLHF/DPO-style fine-tuning, distillation, and RL to deploy reliable policies on real robots across tasks and embodiments.

Working with AI leadership, you will shape post-training strategies, push multimodal reasoning, and ensure robust evaluation. You will mentor the team and collaborate with data groups to improve behavior and safety in real-world settings.

Qualifications

• Post-training large multimodal models (SFT, RLHF/DPO-style) experience.
• Strong RL for large models and policy optimization.
• Experience with multimodal LLMs or VLA at frontier scale.
• A track record of end-to-end model-improvement programs.
• Judgment on what to measure and where to debug.

Responsibilities

• Shape post-training recipe and own key stages to deploy policies.
• Push grounded reasoning, tool use, and multimodal understanding.
• Align model behavior with product and safety requirements.
• Strengthen eval/experimentation spanning offline and on-robot performance.
• Set technical bar, mentor team, and partner with data teams.

Skills

Post-Training Depth

Reinforcement Learning

Frontier-Scale Models

Program Ownership

Measurement & Grounding

Job description

Position Summary

You'll be a senior technical leader for how our foundation models become capable, aligned robot policies. Working alongside our AI leadership and world-class team, you'll drive key work across SFT, preference optimization (RLHF/DPO-style), distillation, and RL—with success measured by policies that act more reliably on real robots in the real world.

Core Responsibilities

• Post-Training Strategy: Help shape the post-training recipe—SFT, preference tuning (RLHF/DPO-style), distillation, and RL—and own key stages of how each turns a strong base model into a deployable policy.
• Reasoning, Tool Use & Multimodality: Push grounded reasoning, tool use, and multimodal understanding for models that must act in the world, not only answer.
• Behavior & Alignment: Align model behavior with product and safety requirements across diverse tasks and embodiments.
• Evaluation Methodology: Strengthen the eval and experimentation methodology that separates real gains from noise—spanning offline metrics and on-robot performance.
• Technical Leadership: Set the technical bar for post-training, mentor the team, and partner with data teams on what data most improves behavior.

Required Qualifications

• Post-Training Depth: Deep hands-on experience post-training large multimodal models—SFT, RLHF/DPO-style preference methods, distillation—with results you have shipped or published.
• Reinforcement Learning: Strong command of RL for large models (reward modeling, policy optimization) and its practical failure modes.
• Frontier-Scale Models: Experience working with multimodal LLMs or VLA models at frontier scale.
• Program Ownership: A record of owning end-to-end model-improvement programs and setting technical direction others follow.
• Measurement & Grounding: Excellent judgment about what to measure, and the instinct to debug across the stack.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with embodied AI, robotics, or vision-language-action models (or strong desire to move from LLMs into the physical world).
• Familiarity with evaluating open-ended, real-world task performance.
• Contributions to influential models, papers, or open-source post-training stacks.

Walden Robotics offers a competitive total compensation program, including salary, annual cash bonus, company equity, company-subsidized insurance programs, 401(k) with company match, flexible PTO, daily lunch, and other benefits. The pay ranges noted on our posts are for salary only.

Walden Robotics is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations, and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request to [e-mail].

Walden Robotics participates in E-Verify. If you receive an offer of employment from Walden, you will need to go through the E-Verify process of digital verification of your employment authorization documents as provided on the Form I-9. Participation in E-Verify does not limit your right to work and verification will only be completed after you become

At Walden Robotics, we envision a world where general-purpose robots dramatically improve the quality of life for all people—supporting us at home, at work, in factories, on farms, and beyond. To accomplish this, we are building a team of exceptional professionals who combine world-class technical skills with creative vision, grounded in humility and collaboration.