Research Scientist

Scaled Foundations is an AI research and deployment company building general robot intelligence, and we are seeking a Research Scientist to join our team. We conduct focused research and engineering to build generalized robotics foundation models that work across form factors such as aerial, ground, manipulation, and others. We are looking for strong candidates who have a background in robotics and machine learning, with experience in areas like multimodal machine learning; synthetic data generation through simulation; LLMs; reinforcement learning and imitation learning for robotics; efficient training and inference.

By applying to this role, you will be considered for multiple teams, such as simulation, foundation model research, and robot deployment.

Research Scientist Responsibilities

• Independently implement state of the art multimodal machine learning models and techniques for robotics.
• Independently identify and execute on reasonable medium to large scale research ideas with many tasks. Apply robotics model improvements to relevant business needs.
• Come up with well thought out hypotheses with a clear focus. Independently design, run, and evaluate experiments to validate these hypotheses.
• Independently identify and debug common issues in training machine learning models such as overfitting/underfitting, efficiency bottlenecks etc
• Work with high fidelity simulation platforms for synthetic data generation at a large scale.
• Keep up to date with the state of the art in multimodal machine learning and foundation models for robotics applications.
• Lead publications and open-sourcing efforts. Communicate your learnings effectively to various stakeholders.

Minimum Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, relevant technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Research experience in machine learning, robotics, and computer vision.
• Programming experience in Python/C++. Detailed understanding of deep learning frameworks like Pytorch or Jax.
• Must obtain work authorization in the country of employment at the time of hire, and maintain ongoing work authorization during employment.
• First author publications at major AI and robotics conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, ICML, ICLR, ICRA, IROS).

Desired Qualifications

• Experience with developing robotics algorithms or machine learning models at scale.
• Detailed understanding of large language models (LLMs) and the Transformer model architecture. Experience with training Transformers for multimodal data.
• Experience with high fidelity simulation platforms such as AirSim, CARLA, Isaac Sim among others.
• Good understanding of systems considerations and the ability to factor these into model choices. Experience building efficient robotics pipelines involving sensor fusion and model inference
• Experience with optimizing and running machine learning models on real robots or edge hardware like Nvidia Jetson, while balancing model performance with latency / compute etc.
• Proven track record of achieving significant research results and innovation