Research Scientist: Pretraining

Generalist • Somerville, MA

4d

About The Position

Generalist is building embodied foundation models to support general intelligence for the physical world, with an initial focus on dexterity. The Research Scientist will build the base intelligence layer for robotics by training large-scale robot foundation models on multimodal datasets that include video, proprioception, action traces, and language. The role designs and runs core pretraining efforts to develop capabilities across embodiments, tasks, and environments. It may suit candidates with experience pretraining large-scale machine-learning systems or generative foundation models, including models outside robotics.

Requirements

• Experience with large-scale ML systems at senior/staff (L6+) level.
• Deep experience training large transformer or diffusion models at scale for generative models, such as language, audio, or video models.
• Experience leading or significantly contributing to multi-node, multi-GPU distributed training efforts.
• Experience with scaling laws, optimization dynamics, and large-model failure modes.
• Strong PyTorch fundamentals and comfort debugging at every layer of the stack.
• Care about empirical rigor and iteration speed.
• Excitement about building general-purpose robot intelligence from first principles.

Responsibilities

• Design and execute large-scale pretraining runs for robot foundation models using transformer- and diffusion-based architectures.
• Define model architectures, objectives, and training curricula across multimodal robotic data, including vision, action, state, and language.
• Develop scalable data mixtures and sampling strategies across petabyte-scale datasets.
• Guide data collection operations toward new directions and source new datasets.
• Run ablations to understand scaling laws, data-quality effects, and architecture tradeoffs.
• Collaborate with ML Infrastructure and Systems teams to improve cluster utilization, throughput, and reliability.
• Turn raw robotic interaction data into generalizable model capabilities.

What This Job Offers

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