Applied Research Scientist / Engineer - Deployment

Rhoda AI • Palo Alto, CA

2d

About The Position

At Rhoda AI, we’re building the next generation of generalist intelligent robots. We own the full robotics stack from high-performance hardware and robot systems to the infrastructure and state-of-the-art foundation world models that control our robots. Our robots are designed to be generalists capable of operating in complex, real-world environments and handling long-tail edge cases, made possibly by our cutting edge research and end-to-end system design. We've raised over $400M and are investing aggressively in model research, infrastructure, hardware development, and manufacturing scale-up to make generalist robotics a reality. We're looking for Applied Research Scientists and Research Engineers to take our foundation world models and adapt them for specific customer applications and industry use cases. We hire across levels — from senior/MTS to staff. This is a customer-facing role at the intersection of research and deployment — you'll work directly with partners and end users to understand their needs, translate them into model adaptations, and deliver measurable improvements in real-world settings across industries like logistics, manufacturing, and beyond.

Requirements

• Strong ML research and engineering skills with hands-on experience fine-tuning or adapting large models
• Ability to move fluidly between customer requirements and technical implementation
• Solid understanding of modern ML pipelines: pre-training, fine-tuning, evaluation, and deployment
• Comfort working across teams — research, engineering, and customer-facing functions
• Strong communication skills: ability to explain model behavior and tradeoffs to non-technical audiences
• Experience in a customer-facing, applied research, or solutions engineering role
• Staff-level candidates are expected to define technical direction and drive research strategy independently; senior/MTS candidates execute complex projects with strong fundamentals and growing scope

Nice To Haves

• Experience adapting foundation models (LLMs, VLMs, or policy models) to domain-specific applications
• Familiarity with one or more relevant verticals (e.g., logistics, manufacturing, warehouse automation, agriculture)
• Familiarity with inference optimization and runtime constraints (latency, memory, hardware targets) — sufficient to work alongside inference engineers, not own it
• Experience with sim-to-real transfer or adapting models trained in one environment to operate in another
• Hands-on experience with real robot deployments in production or near-production settings
• PhD or strong research background in ML, Robotics, or a related field

Responsibilities

• Work directly with customers and partners to understand application requirements and translate them into concrete model adaptation strategies
• Fine-tune and adapt our foundation world models for domain-specific tasks, environments, and operational constraints
• Design and run targeted experiments to evaluate model performance against customer-defined success criteria
• Build application-specific evaluation benchmarks and testing frameworks to validate model behavior in real customer environments
• Identify gaps between general-purpose model capabilities and the requirements of specific use cases, and drive research to close them
• Collaborate with the core research team to surface patterns and insights from customer deployments that inform foundational model development
• Communicate technical findings clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree