Research Scientist / Engineer - Efficient Modeling

Rhoda AI • Palo Alto, CA

9d

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 a Research Scientist or Research Engineer focused on model efficiency — making our foundation world models faster, smaller, and more deployable without sacrificing capability. This work is critical to closing the gap between research-scale models and real-time operation on robot hardware.

Requirements

• Strong understanding of model compression and efficient architectures for large models
• Hands-on experience with quantization, distillation, or pruning applied to transformers or large neural networks
• Deep knowledge of where efficiency gains are possible in modern architectures
• Proficiency with PyTorch and familiarity with hardware-aware optimization (CUDA, TensorRT, or similar)
• Ability to run principled experiments that characterize capability-efficiency tradeoffs

Nice To Haves

• PhD in ML, CS, or a related field — or equivalent research/engineering experience
• Publication record at NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, MLSys, or related venues
• Experience with efficient video or multimodal model architectures
• Familiarity with edge deployment targets (Jetson, custom ASICs, or mobile hardware)
• Prior work on speculative decoding, early exit, or adaptive compute
• Experience deploying compressed models on physical robots or latency-constrained systems

Responsibilities

• Research and implement model compression techniques: quantization, pruning, structured sparsity, distillation, and low-rank approximation
• Design efficient architectures and attention mechanisms suited to real-time inference on edge and robot hardware
• Develop training strategies that produce better accuracy-efficiency tradeoffs from the start
• Profile and benchmark models across hardware targets to identify and resolve efficiency bottlenecks
• Build evaluation frameworks that measure capability retention after compression or architecture changes
• Collaborate with training systems and deployment teams to ensure efficient models translate to faster real-world inference
• Publish and present work at top-tier venues (especially valued for RS track)

Benefits

• Your work determines whether frontier capabilities actually run on our hardware
• High leverage: efficiency improvements benefit every model the team trains and deploys
• Work at a rare intersection of deep learning research and systems

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed