Senior Research Engineer, Mechanical Intuition in Multimodal Models

Senior Research Engineer

At Toyota Research Institute (TRI), we're on a mission to improve the quality of human life. We're developing new tools and capabilities to amplify the human experience. To lead this transformative shift in mobility, we've built a world-class team advancing the state of the art in AI, robotics, driving, and material sciences.

The Opportunity

We are looking for a Senior Research Engineer to join us in building the systems and tools that power our research on physical AI. This role is well-suited for someone with a strong software engineering foundation, deep experience working with geometry or physical modeling, and a genuine interest in how things are made.

As a research engineer on the team, you will design and build the pipelines and tooling that allow researchers to move fast and measure what matters — from large-scale training and evaluation infrastructure to the geometry processing and physics-aware components at the core of our models. You will work at the intersection of software engineering and research, translating emerging ideas into robust, production-quality implementations.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain robust and efficient pipelines for model training and evaluation, with a focus on reliability, scalability, and researcher productivity.
• Develop tools and frameworks to measure and improve model performance across multiple dimensions, including accuracy, generalization, and computational efficiency.
• Collaborate closely with researchers to translate emerging techniques and experimental findings into clean, production-ready implementations.
• Build high-performance systems for geometry manipulation, processing, and modeling, including integration with CAD, CAM, or related geometric representations.
• Contribute to the team's shared infrastructure and codebase, raising the standard for code quality, testing, and documentation.

Qualifications

• An MS or equivalent in Computer Science, Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field, plus several years of relevant industry or research experience.
• A strong track record of designing and shipping reliable software systems, with an ability to work across the full stack of a research engineering project.
• Experience working with computational geometry, CAD, CAM, or graphics systems, and a clear understanding of the challenges involved in processing and representing complex 3D geometry.
• Experience building performant systems for geometry manipulation or modeling — including efficient data structures, algorithms, or GPU-accelerated pipelines.
• Interest in manufacturing, simulation, or process automation, and enthusiasm for working in a domain where software has direct physical consequences.

Bonus Qualifications

• Familiarity with topology optimization, constraint solving, or CSG representations, and experience applying these in applied research or production contexts.
• Experience with physical modeling in some form — finite element analysis, neural ODEs or PDEs, or physical simulation frameworks such as MuJoCo, Taichi, or similar tools.
• Exposure to machine learning model development, including training pipelines, evaluation harnesses, and experiment tracking at scale.
• Prior experience in a research lab or research-adjacent engineering role, with an appreciation for how to balance rigor and velocity.