Senior Research Scientist, Physical AI Infra

Bytedance; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 218,000 - 388,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental & Vision insurance

401(k) with company match

Parental leave

Disability coverage

Life insurance

Wellbeing benefits

Paid holidays

Sick days

Personal time off

Job summary

ByteDance is seeking a Senior Research Scientist to drive the Physical AI Infra platform in San Jose. This role leads design, implementation, and operation of core components across data pipelines, simulation, model training, and deployment on heterogeneous hardware.

You will advance scalable infrastructure for multimodal and robotics models, translate research into production capabilities, and guide complex project design with a focus on reliability and performance.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or above in a related technical field or equivalent practical experience.
• 5 years of software engineering, ML systems, robotics, or related industry experience.
• Strong fundamentals in software and systems engineering for production-scale distributed or data-intensive systems.
• Deep expertise in robotic learning, AI training/inference infrastructure, or robotics data and simulation.

Responsibilities

• Own design, implementation, validation, and operation of major components within a Physical AI platform.
• Develop scalable infrastructure for training and serving multimodal and robotics models.
• Translate research ideas into production-ready capabilities with reliability and performance targets.
• Lead technical design for complex projects, balancing performance, reliability, cost, and delivery speed.
• Collaborate with teams, mentor engineers, and contribute to shared architecture and standards.

Skills

Software engineering

ML systems

Robotics

Distributed systems

Education

Bachelor's degree or higher in CS/CE/Robotics/EE/AI

Job description

Senior Research Scientist, Physical AI Infra

Location:

San Jose

Team:

Technology

Employment Type:

Regular

Job Code:

A65123A

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Responsibilities

About the team:The Infra-Compute division builds large-scale, highly available cloud and AI infrastructure that powers our public cloud offerings and internal products. Our US team develops technologies across AI training, inference, and agent infrastructure.We are expanding this work into Physical AI: intelligent systems that perceive, reason, and act in the physical world. The team focuses on infrastructure for Physical AI, including data and simulation platforms, distributed training and inference, and deployment on heterogeneous hardware. We collaborate closely with customers, researchers, open-source communities, and hardware partners to turn emerging research into reliable, scalable systems.

• Independently own the design, implementation, validation, and operation of major components within a Physical AI platform, focusing on one or more areas across data pipelines, simulation, model training, evaluation, inference, and heterogeneous deployment.
• Develop scalable infrastructure for training and serving multimodal and robotics models, including vision-language-action models, world models, and robot policies.
• Translate research ideas into production-ready capabilities, with clear reliability, performance, and quality targets.
• Lead technical design for complex projects, make well-reasoned trade-offs across performance, reliability, cost, and delivery speed, and drive projects through production adoption.
• Collaborate with adjacent teams, mentor engineers, and contribute to shared architecture and engineering standards.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or above in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5 years of software engineering, machine learning systems, robotics, or related industry experience.
• Strong software and systems engineering fundamentals, with experience designing, building, and operating production-scale distributed or data-intensive systems.
• Deep expertise in at least one of the following areas:- Robotic learning, including imitation learning, reinforcement learning, vision-language-action models, world models, or policy evaluation.- AI training and inference infrastructure, including distributed training, inference engines, GPU kernels, or collective communication.- Robotics data and simulation systems, including multimodal dataset verification, synthetic data generation, simulation, data curation, or sim-to-real workflows.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Contributions to relevant open-source projects such as Isaac Lab, Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, Cosmos, vLLM-Omni, SGLang Omni, RLInf, etc.
• Experience building large-scale AI or robotics platforms used by multiple teams or external customers, or experience with real-world robot systems and operational challenges.

Job Information

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $218400 - $387600 annually.

Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work, and this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units.

Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure).

The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:

1. 1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;
2. 2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems;
3. 3. Exercising sound judgment.

About Us

Founded in 2012, ByteDance's mission is to inspire creativity and enrich life. With a suite of more than a dozen products, including TikTok, Lemon8, CapCut and Pico as well as platforms specific to the China market, including Toutiao, Douyin, and Xigua, ByteDance has made it easier and more fun for people to connect with, consume, and create content.

Why Join ByteDance

Inspiring creativity is at the core of ByteDance's mission. Our innovative products are built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and enrich life - a mission we work towards every day.

As ByteDancers, we strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our Company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.

Diversity & Inclusion

ByteDance is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At ByteDance, our mission is to inspire creativity and enrich life. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.

Reasonable Accommodation

ByteDance is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at https://tinyurl.com/RA-request