Research Scientist

OpenMind • San Francisco, CA

55d

About The Position

OpenMind is building the social intelligence layer for robotics, focusing on models that enable robots to understand people, context, and norms for safe human-robot collaboration. The research agenda includes social world models, vision-language-action systems, cross-embodiment learning, and multi-robot orchestration. The role involves defining and executing research that is quickly deployed on real robots, leveraging real-world embodied deployment data such as egocentric video, state-action logs, and large-scale human-robot interaction data.

Requirements

• MS or PhD in machine learning, robotics, or a related field, or equivalent research experience with a strong publication record.
• Deep expertise in at least one of: world models, VLA models, imitation or reinforcement learning, multimodal foundation models.
• Strong engineering fundamentals in languages such as Python, Go, and/or C++.
• Ability to train own models and write production-quality research code.
• A bias toward research that survives contact with the real world.

Nice To Haves

• First-author publications at CoRL, RSS, ICRA, ICML, NeurIPS, or ICLR.
• Experience deploying learned policies on physical hardware.
• Prior work at a frontier AI lab or leading robotics research group.

Responsibilities

• Conduct original research on social world models, VLA architectures, and embodied reasoning, and drive it from idea to deployed system.
• Design data strategies that leverage real-world deployment data for training and evaluation.
• Build rigorous evaluations for socially intelligent behavior, including simulation-based benchmarks and real-world measurement.
• Publish at top venues (CoRL, RSS, ICRA, NeurIPS) and represent OpenMind in the research community.
• Collaborate directly with platform and deployment teams to ensure research lands on physical robots quickly.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior