Research Scientist – World Modeling

Percepta • Boston, MA

4d

About The Position

As a Research Scientist - World Modeling at Percepta, you'll build the systems that let us understand an operation at its full complexity. Real operations rarely arrive as clean, structured data: the ground truth about the operation lives scattered across claims, clinical notes, call transcripts, contracts, and the tacit judgment of operators. You'll build models and agents that learn to compress this mess into a tractable, continuously-updated representation — effectively a digital twin of the operation — that forecasters, user models, and optimizers downstream can all reason and plan against.

Requirements

• PhD degree in Computer Science, Operations Research, Industrial Engineering, or Applied Mathematics or have equivalent research/industry experience.
• Have depth in simulation or world modeling
• Have experience in novel machine learning techniques for control and optimization, including test-time search and reinforcement learning for sequential decision-making.
• Are comfortable implementing and debugging large-scale optimization systems, and designing benchmarks with real, defensible ground truth.
• Are motivated by impact in critical industries including healthcare, supply chains, energy, and finance.
• Have a proven track record of execution.
• Are an excellent communicator with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Enjoy extreme ownership.
• Are passionate about AI's transformative potential

Responsibilities

• Design and build learned world models that compress messy, multi-modal operational data (notes, transcripts, contracts, telemetry) into tractable, decision-relevant representations.
• Model the transition dynamics of real operations — how a workforce, facility, or network evolves state-to-state — so downstream systems can run counterfactuals before a decision touches a real person or asset.
• Build and validate digital twins of customer operations, benchmarked against replayable, real-world testbeds with defensible ground truth.
• Partner closely with the forecasting and optimization teams to ensure your representations are the right substrate for calibrated predictions and for finding optimal actions.
• Bridge research into practice by partnering with engineers to deploy world models into live customer environments and push toward end-to-end production systems.

What This Job Offers

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