Principal Research Scientist, Robot Foundation Models

Overview

As Principal Research Scientist on the MEGA team, you will help define the research agenda and technical strategy for robotics foundation models. You will work across the robot-learning stack, from data pipelines to model architectures and evaluations, guiding real-world experiments with robots. You’ll collaborate with scientists, engineers and hardware teams to translate research ideas into scalable, deployed capabilities. This senior role offers ownership over ambitious, world-class research in embodied AI with a strong impact on future mobility and robotic perception, reasoning and action.

Pay / Benefits

• Meaningful equity
• Relocation support and visa sponsorship
• Hybrid working with core hours
• Learning and development budgets
• Health insurance and dental
• Enhanced maternity/paternity leave and retirement plans

Responsibilities

• Research architectures and data for robot foundation models
• Experiment with models such as VLAs, WAMs, omni-modal and video models
• Explore reinforcement learning, behavioural cloning and related policy-learning methods
• Synthesize, curate and filter large-scale video datasets
• Build scalable distributed training pipelines and infrastructure
• Influence robot policy development and data strategy
• Collaborate with scientists, engineers and robotics teams to connect research to real-world robot performance
• Contribute to internal communications and external publications

Key requirements

• Deep experience in machine learning focusing on vision-language models, video models, robot policies, or robotics foundation models
• Experience with scalable training (multi-node, large datasets, large models)
• Strong research track record with top-tier publications
• Strong coding skills with modern ML frameworks
• Ability to design and drive an independent research agenda while collaborating with engineering and robotics teams
• Experience translating research ideas into working systems or deployed capabilities
• Strong communication skills and the ability to influence technical direction across teams

• Strong communication and collaboration
• Strategic thinking and leadership in research direction
• Ability to influence cross-team decisions
• Vision-language models
• Video models
• Robot policies

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