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Research Engineer — Foundational Models & World Models for Robotics

Rhoda AI

Rhoda AI

Palo Alto, CA, USA
Posted on Mar 17, 2026

Location

Palo Alto

Employment Type

Full time

Department

Research

At Rhoda AI, we're building the full-stack foundation for the next generation of humanoid robots — from high-performance, software-defined hardware to the foundational models and video world models that control it. Our robots are designed to be generalists capable of operating in complex, real-world environments and handling scenarios unseen in training. We work at the intersection of large-scale learning, robotics, and systems, with a research team that includes researchers from Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, and beyond. We're not building a feature; we're building a new computing platform for physical work — and with over $400M raised, we're investing aggressively in the R&D, hardware development, and manufacturing scale-up to make that a reality.

We're looking for Research Engineers to work closely with this team on end-to-end model development. This is a hands-on role spanning the full stack: data, infrastructure, model training, and deployment. You'll help turn research ideas into scalable, working systems — including learning and leveraging world models for planning, prediction, and control.

What You'll Do

  • Design and implement foundational models and world models for large-scale robotic learning

  • Build and maintain data pipelines (collection, curation, filtering, augmentation) for multimodal robotic data (vision, proprioception, actions, language, video)

  • Work on pre-training and post-training (fine-tuning, alignment, evaluation) of large models and world models

  • Implement and experiment with different model architectures

  • Develop training and evaluation frameworks for world models, including rollout quality, long-horizon prediction, and downstream task performance

  • Optimize training infrastructure and workflows (distributed training, efficiency, debugging)

  • Collaborate closely with researchers to translate ideas into robust, scalable implementations

  • Support experiments, ablations, and real-world deployment on robotic systems

What We're Looking For

  • Strong software engineering skills with a research mindset

  • Experience implementing ML models end-to-end, not just running existing code

  • Familiarity with the full ML pipeline: data → pre-training → post-training → evaluation → deployment

  • Solid foundation in deep learning and modern ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, JAX)

  • Ability to reason about and debug complex learning systems, including world model training and usage

  • Comfortable working in an ambiguous, fast-moving startup environment

Nice to Have (But Not Required)

  • Publications at top ML/robotics conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CoRL, RSS, ICRA)

  • PhD/Masters or equivalent research experience

  • Experience with world models or generative models for control

  • Experience working with large models (LLMs, vision-language models, video models, large-scale policy models)

  • Experience with large-scale training infrastructure (distributed training, clusters, cloud or on-prem systems)

Why This Role

  • Work with an elite research team from Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, and beyond

  • Work on foundational models and world models for real-world robotics — not toy environments

  • Tight collaboration between research and engineering (no silos)

  • Direct connection between research ideas and real robotic behavior

  • High ownership and impact in a small, ambitious team