Research Scientist

The role

You will define and lead research directions in action-conditioned world models, physical AI, and generative modeling for embodied systems. You will design architectures, training objectives, and evaluation frameworks while partnering with industrial collaborators.

What you will do

• Define and lead research directions in action-conditioned world models, physical AI, and generative modeling for embodied systems
• Design novel architectures, training objectives, and evaluation frameworks for VLMs, VLAs, and world models
• Direct research efforts with the goal of publishing in top journals
• Partner with industrial collaborators to ground research in real-world physical AI use cases
• Mentor research engineers and collaborate cross-functionally to move research into production
• Stay at the frontier of the field by synthesizing relevant literature and identifying opportunities
• Contribute to Hedra's research culture and external scientific reputation

Required qualifications

• PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Robotics, or a related field
• Publications at top ML or robotics venues
• Deep expertise in generative modeling, world models, or vision-language(-action) models
• Strong publication record at NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, CoRL, or equivalent venues
• Experience with large-scale model training and modern deep learning infrastructure
• Ability to independently drive research projects from ideation through publication
• Strong collaboration and communication skills

Nice to have

• Background in embodied AI, robotic manipulation, or sim-to-real transfer
• Experience with RLHF, DPO, or preference optimization for model alignment

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and equity
• 401k (no match)
• Healthcare (Silver PPO Medical, Vision, Dental)
• Lunch and snacks at the office

About the company

Hedra is a research and infrastructure lab advancing post-training and inference for multimodal and physical AI. The team works fully in person in San Francisco.