DataJobs
RoleSuite
CompaniesRemoteAboutMethodologyContactPrivacy
Updated 2026-06-10 04:00 UTC·© 2025–2026 RoleSuite
← Back to listings

Research Scientist / Engineer - Pre-training Data & Evaluation

Rhoda AI · Palo Alto

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 possible 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 Research Scientists and Research Engineers to build the data and evaluation foundations for our video action model. This team owns web-scale video data curation, annotation pipelines, and evaluation methodology — directly determining the quality of the video pretraining distribution and how clearly we can measure model progress. We hire across levels — from MTS-Staff

What You'll Do

  • Design and implement scalable curation pipelines for web-scale video pretraining data: ingestion, deduplication, quality filtering, and content classification across internet-scale video corpora

  • Develop video-specific annotation frameworks and quality filters — motion quality, scene diversity, action content, temporal coherence — to improve pretraining signal

  • Build evaluation frameworks and benchmarks to measure causal video model capabilities: prediction quality, temporal coherence, long-horizon rollout fidelity, and downstream robot task performance

  • Research and implement data selection, mixing, and weighting strategies that improve video generation quality and transfer to robotic control

  • Deploy and scale vision-language models (VLMs) and video understanding models for automated annotation, filtering, and content scoring at web scale

  • Collaborate closely with pre-training and post-training teams to ensure data quality and evaluation methodology drive research decisions

  • Track model capability trends across training runs, catching regressions and surfacing improvements early

What We're Looking For

  • Strong understanding of data-centric ML and how web video data quality affects large generative model performance

  • Experience building large-scale video data pipelines: ingestion, filtering, deduplication, and quality scoring

  • Familiarity with video-specific data characteristics: temporal structure, motion quality, scene diversity, and action content

  • Solid ML fundamentals with hands-on experience training or evaluating large generative models

  • Ability to design evaluations for video generation models that are diagnostic, reproducible, and actionable

  • 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 Have (But Not Required)

  • PhD or strong research background in ML, computer vision, or a related field

  • Experience with large-scale web video dataset curation (e.g., WebVid, HowTo100M, Ego4D, or similar)

  • Familiarity with video generation quality metrics (FVD, perceptual quality, motion consistency)

  • Experience running VLM or CLIP-style inference at scale for automated video filtering and annotation

  • Prior work on evaluation methodology for video generation or world models

  • Understanding of how web video data properties connect to downstream robotic action prediction

  • Publication record at NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, or related venues

Why This Role

  • The video curation and evaluation rigor you build directly determines pretraining quality and research iteration speed for the entire team

  • Build the benchmark infrastructure that gives the team an honest signal of model progress toward real robot performance

  • High leverage: improvements to data quality compound across every training run

  • Work at the intersection of large-scale systems and generative model research with visibility across all model development

Apply →

Other roles at Rhoda AI

  • HR ManagerMountain View
  • Staff Electrical Engineer (Sensors & Imaging Systems)Mountain View
  • Robot Software EngineerMountain View
  • Senior Actuator Modeling EngineerPalo Alto
  • Senior Electrical Engineer- Power ManagementPalo Alto
  • Robotics Software Test Engineer Palo Alto
  • Robot System QAMountain View
  • Research Scientist / Engineer - Efficient ModelingMountain View
  • Research Scientist / Engineer - Video Generation ModelingPalo Alto
  • Applied Research Scientist / Engineer - DeploymentPalo Alto

More Data & ML roles

  • Senior Manager, Vx Data Governance and EnablementPfizer · India - Mumbai
  • Principal Data ScientistJohnson & Johnson · Bangalore, Karnataka, India
  • Data Scientist – Seed Robotics & AIEnza Zaden · Enkhuizen, The Netherlands
  • Finance Data EngineerApple · Cupertino
  • Director, Data Science, Personalization, Gemini App, DeepMindGoogle · Mountain View, CA, USA
  • Data EngineerApple · Cupertino
  • Business and Marketing Data Scientist, Applied Machine LearningGoogle · New York, NY, USA
  • Finance Data EngineerApple · Cupertino
  • Principal Applied Scientist UiPath · Bellevue
  • Generative AI Applied Scientist, SIML - ISEApple · Cupertino