Chief Science Officer (m/f/d)

Stuttgart Schockenriedstr. 17, Remote. Posted 23 days ago

The role

The Chief Science Officer will own the research behind the Cortex vision-language-action foundation model. This person will lead the research organization in Zurich and Stuttgart to turn fleet data into robotic intelligence.

What you will do

Set the research agenda for Cortex including VLA models, world models, and planning
Make decisions on research directions, people, and compute
Own the data strategy including deployment, teleoperation, open-source, and synthetic data
Own the compute strategy from large-scale training to real-time inference
Build evaluation science and benchmarks for customer operations
Build and lead the research organisation in Zurich and Stuttgart
Set the hiring bar for the research team
Take research into production with engineering
Decide what to publish, open-source, or patent
Act as the scientific voice with customers, partners, universities, and investors

Required qualifications

Led research in robot learning or embodied AI (VLA models, imitation or reinforcement learning, world models)
Built a team around research
Work runs on real robots, ideally outside the lab
Strong scientific standing with a record at top venues and a network of researchers
Experience making calls on research bets, data, and compute
Ability to explain science to engineers, customers, and investors
PhD in machine learning, robotics or a related field, or an equivalent track record

Nice to have

large-scale pretraining of foundation models
fleet learning or data engines
industrial manipulation
experience in both academia and industry

Benefits

Robots in live production that learn every day
Meaningful equity
Large-scale compute
Freedom to build the research organisation
Relocation support

Before you apply

Conversations with both founders
A research deep dive with the team
A working session on a real problem from deployments

About the company

Sereact builds the robot brain for physical work using the Cortex vision-language-action foundation model. Founded in 2021, the company has raised more than $145 million and works in small, senior teams.