Research Member of Technical Staff - Data & Evaluation

Location Palo Alto Employment Type Full time Department Research At Rhoda AI, we're building the full-stack foundation for the next generation of humanoid robots — from high-performance, software-defined hardware to the foundational models and video world models that control it. Our robots are designed to be generalists capable of operating in complex, real-world environments and handling scenarios unseen in training. We work at the intersection of large-scale learning, robotics, and systems, with a research team that includes researchers from Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, and beyond. We're not building a feature; we're building a new computing platform for physical work — and with over $400M raised, we're investing aggressively in the R&D, hardware development, and manufacturing scale-up to make that 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 #J-18808-Ljbffr Rhoda AI