Senior / Staff AI Research Scientist, Foundation Models

RoboForce; Milpitas (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Health, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) plan

Visa sponsorship

Team lunches & events

Job summary

RoboForce in Milpitas, CA is seeking a Senior / Staff AI Research Scientist, Foundation Models to advance robotic embodied intelligence.

You will develop algorithms that enable robots to understand their environment, interpret and execute tasks, and communicate seamlessly with humans — with a particular focus on building and training world models that allow robots to predict, plan, and generalize across complex physical tasks.

Qualifications

• PhD in Machine Learning, Robotics, or related field, or Master's with 4+ years of experience.
• Proficiency in Python and deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, JAX).
• Expertise in large foundation models (VLM, VLA).
• Strong world-model and action-conditioned generation knowledge.
• Familiarity with multimodal models and modern ML architectures (transformers, diffusion).
• Requires 5 days/week in-office collaboration with the teams.

Responsibilities

• Design and deploy vision-language models for contextual understanding and robot action policies.
• Develop world models for action-conditioned prediction, planning, and environment simulation.
• Research multi-modal inputs to improve world-model fidelity.
• Build foundation models with spatial reasoning for precise robotic actions.
• Integrate multi-modal data to enable natural human-robot communication.
• Optimize and deploy production-grade models on RoboForce platforms.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

JAX

Foundation models

World models

Multimodal ML

Transformers

CUDA

TensorRT

Education

PhD in ML/Robotics or related field

MS with 4+ years experience

Tools

TensorRT

CUDA

Git

Job description

RoboForce is an AI robotics company building Physical AI and Robo-Labor system for dull, dirty, and dangerous work. Our flagship robot, TITAN, is a super humanoid robot designed for industrial environments. We are based in Milpitas, CA and require 5 days/week in-office collaboration.

We are looking for a Senior / Staff AI Research Scientist, Foundation Models to advance robotic embodied intelligence. In this role, you will develop algorithms that enable robots to understand their environment, interpret and execute tasks, and communicate seamlessly with humans — with a particular focus on building and training world models that allow robots to predict, plan, and generalize across complex physical tasks.

Responsibilities

• Design and deploy vision-language(-action) models (VLM/VLA) for contextual understanding and generalized robot action policies.
• Develop and train world models for action-conditioned prediction, long-horizon planning, and environment simulation — enabling robots to reason about the consequences of their actions before execution.
• Research approaches to improve world model fidelity using multi-modal inputs including vision, language, proprioception, and spatial representations.
• Develop foundation models with spatial reasoning capabilities to achieve high-precision robotic actions.
• Integrate multi-modal data sources (vision, language, speech, etc.) to enable natural human-robot communication.
• Optimize and deploy models as production-grade solutions on RoboForce robotic platforms.

Requirements

• PhD degree in Machine Learning, Robotics, or related field, or Master's degree with 4+ years of relevant experience.
• Proficiency in Python and deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, JAX).
• Expertise in large foundation models (VLM, VLA, etc.).
• Strong understanding of world model architectures and action-conditioned generative modeling for robot learning.
• Decent understanding of multimodal models, modern ML architectures (transformers, diffusion models, etc.).
• Requires 5 days/week in-office collaboration with the teams.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience with video generation or prediction models (e.g., diffusion-based video models, autoregressive video transformers) and their application to world modeling or synthetic data generation for robot learning.
• Strong publication record at top conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ICCV, CoRL, ICRA, or equivalent).
• Expertise in neural network deployment (e.g., TensorRT) and GPU programming with CUDA.
• Proven ability to design scalable experimentation and data pipelines.
• Competitive stock options/equity programs.
• Health, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k) plan.
• Visa sponsorship and green card support for qualified candidates.
• Lunches and dinners, a fully stocked kitchen, and regular team-building events.