Research Scientist, Robotics & World Models at Innodata

About this role

Innodata (Nasdaq: INOD) is a global data engineering company. We believe that data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are inextricably linked. Our mission is to enable the responsible advancement of artificial intelligence by providing the data, evaluation frameworks, and human expertise required to build AI systems that can be trusted at scale. We provide a range of transferable solutions, platforms, and services for Generative AI / AI builders and adopters. In every relationship, we honor our 36+ year legacy delivering the highest quality data and outstanding outcomes for our customers.

Scope of the Role

Progress in physical AI is gated as much by data design as by model architecture. The best manipulation and locomotion policies, vision-language-action models, and world models are only as good as the trajectories, demonstrations, and environments they learn from — so the highest-leverage decisions are made long before a model trains: what to capture, what to synthesize, how to represent an action, and how to know whether any of it will transfer to a real robot. Innodata is building the data and evaluation practice behind the next generation of robotics foundation models, in direct partnership with the customers and frontier labs defining that frontier. We are hiring a Research Scientist to own the science of that data.

You will partner directly with the customers and frontier labs building robot foundation models, as interested in the data those models learn from as in the models themselves. Your leverage is scientific judgment about data: deciding what is worth capturing in the real world versus generating in simulation, how to weight a training mix across embodiments and sensors, and how to measure whether a policy will hold up outside the lab. Your conclusions will shape what our partners collect next.

What You’ll Own

You’ll Thrive in This Role If You Have

Roughly 4+ years of hands-on industry experience in robot learning or robotics ML. We weight practical experience over formal credentials; because the field is young, a PhD with a compelling, current research agenda can offset the lower end, and we will also consider very senior candidates with the right background.

A Bachelor's degree in computer science, electrical engineering, robotics, or a related technical field is required; an advanced degree (MS or PhD) in a relevant field is preferred.

Trained and evaluated robot policies yourself — manipulation or locomotion via imitation learning or reinforcement learning — with strong PyTorch fundamentals. You build and measure models, you don't just call them.

A way of thinking in datasets: you have curated, filtered, and weighted robot data across embodiments and sensors, and you have real opinions about what makes it good for a given objective.

Fluency in robotics data formats and standards — the LeRobot dataset format, RLDS, and Open X-Embodiment — along with common motion and sensor formats.

Hands-on experience with simulation and synthetic data — NVIDIA Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, and Omniverse, or MuJoCo and comparable engines — including domain randomization, system identification, and sim-to-real transfer.

Experience with teleoperation or egocentric data collection, and comfort adapting VLM backbones for control and fine-tuning large VLA models with the modern toolchain (HuggingFace transformers, PEFT).

A track record the field recognizes: first-author publications or strong open-source contributions at venues such as CoRL, ICRA, IROS, RSS, or NeurIPS.

The ability to work directly with the research scientists at the customers and frontier labs we partner with, and to explain data and modeling decisions clearly to both expert and non-expert audiences, backed by a rigorous, reproducible approach to experiments and documentation.

Bonus: interest or hands-on experience in responsible-AI evaluation and red-teaming for embodied systems, for example safety and robustness testing.

The expected salary range for this position is $160,000 - $185,000 p/year, based on experience, skills, and qualifications.

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Research Scientist, Robotics & World Models