Research Scientist, Robotics & World Models

The role

You will define how Innodata designs, structures, and evaluates data for robot foundation models. You will partner with customers and frontier labs to decide what data to capture in the real world versus simulation.

What you will do

• Translate robotics foundation model requirements into concrete data specifications
• Decide what to capture in the real world versus generating in simulation
• Curate and weight training mixes across heterogeneous robot datasets
• Guide collection across capture modalities and synthetic pipelines
• Build evaluation and benchmarking methodology to predict real-world transfer
• Run experiments to fine-tune and evaluate foundation models
• Design adversarial and long-horizon evaluations
• Publish benchmarks, methodology, and papers
• Collaborate with capture labs, annotation teams, and synthetic-data pipelines

Required qualifications

• 4+ years of hands-on industry experience in robot learning or robotics ML
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, electrical engineering, robotics, or a related technical field
• Trained and evaluated robot policies via imitation learning or reinforcement learning
• Strong PyTorch fundamentals
• Experience curating, filtering, and weighting robot data across embodiments and sensors
• Fluency in robotics data formats and standards including LeRobot dataset format, RLDS, and Open X-Embodiment
• Hands-on experience with simulation and synthetic data such as NVIDIA Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, Omniverse, or MuJoCo
• Experience with teleoperation or egocentric data collection
• Comfort adapting VLM backbones for control and fine-tuning large VLA models with HuggingFace transformers and PEFT
• First-author publications or strong open-source contributions at venues such as CoRL, ICRA, IROS, RSS, or NeurIPS
• Ability to work directly with research scientists at customers and frontier labs

Nice to have

• Advanced degree (MS or PhD) in a relevant field
• Interest or hands-on experience in responsible-AI evaluation and red-teaming for embodied systems

About the company

Innodata is a global data engineering company. Their mission is to enable the responsible advancement of artificial intelligence by providing data, evaluation frameworks, and human expertise.