Senior Vision-Language Robotics Research Engineer

XDOF; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Equity

Comprehensive health benefits

Flexible work arrangements

Collaborative environment

Job summary

XDOF in the San Francisco Bay Area is seeking a Research Engineer/Scientist to lead data-centric robotics research at the intersection of vision-language models and robot learning. You will build systems turning raw egocentric and teleoperation video into high-signal training data for VLA models and contribute to models themselves.

You will develop representations bridging vision, language, and action, work with large-scale datasets, and collaborate with partner labs to define data requirements

Qualifications

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Machine Learning, or related field from a top-tier program.
• 3–7 years of research or applied research experience in vision-language models, video understanding, robot learning, or generative modeling.
• Deep fluency in PyTorch; working knowledge of distributed training, mixed precision, large batch workflows.
• Published work or demonstrable impact in VLMs/VLAs, video representation learning, imitation learning, or related area.
• Strong engineering fundamentals — design clean systems, not just run experiments.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement vision-language pipelines for egocentric and teleoperation video; structured captioning, temporal grounding, action-conditioned scene understanding, and semantic annotation at scale.
• Develop representations that bridge visual perception, language, and low-level robot action; spanning VLAs, video prediction, and world models.
• Build and improve data curation systems that assess quality, diversity, and coverage of large-scale robot demonstration datasets.
• Work hands-on with bimanual and high-DoF manipulation data, including real teleoperation footage and sim-generated rollouts.
• Collaborate with partner labs to define data requirements and close the loop between data quality and downstream policy performance.
• Stay current on research frontier (VLAs, video foundation models, flow matching, DiT architectures, egocentric pretraining) and translate insights into production systems.

Skills

Vision-language models

Video understanding

Robot learning

Research and engineering

Publish research

Education

MS or PhD in CS/Robotics/ML

Tools

PyTorch

Large-scale training infra

Job description

XDOF in the San Francisco Bay Area is seeking a Research Engineer/Scientist to lead data-centric robotics research at the intersection of vision-language models and robot learning. You will build systems turning raw egocentric and teleoperation video into high-signal training data for VLA models and contribute to models themselves.

You will develop representations bridging vision, language, and action, work with large-scale datasets, and collaborate with partner labs to define data requirements