Research Scientist - World Modeling, Data

Job Description

Job Description

About the Institute of Foundation Models

We are a dedicated research lab for building, understanding, using, and risk-managing foundation models. Our mandate is to advance research, nurture the next generation of AI builders, and drive transformative contributions to a knowledge-driven economy.

As part of our team, you’ll have the opportunity to work on the core of cutting-edge foundation model training, alongside world-class researchers, data scientists, and engineers, tackling the most fundamental and impactful challenges in AI development. You will participate in the development of groundbreaking AI solutions that have the potential to reshape entire industries. Strategic and innovative problem-solving skills will be instrumental in establishing MBZUAI as a global hub for high-performance computing in deep learning, driving impactful discoveries that inspire the next generation of AI pioneers.

Position Summary 

We are looking for Research Scientists to tackle the data problems that determine our world model capabilities. You will design, develop, and run state-of-the-art systems for curating, ingesting, filtering, annotating, and training with billion-scale visual data. You will work on problems including, but not limited to, motion scoring, camera control, and video understanding. You will translate our team’s human efforts into durable automated systems, whose performance is quantitatively verifiable. 

Salary Range

The posted salary range represents the company’s good faith estimate of the compensation for this position upon hire. The actual compensation offered may vary within this range depending on individual qualifications, including but not limited to relevant skills, experience, education, certifications, geographic location, and specific business needs.  

Key Responsibilities  

• Translate requirements from downstream training, application and eval teams to actionable data work. 

• Design and build scalable data pipelines. 

• Collaborate with engineering to scale data pipelines on AWS infrastructure and in-house clusters. 

• Develop state-of-the-art visual understanding systems to accurately label and annotate images and videos, such as for detecting AI-generated content. 

Academic Qualifications 

• PhD in Machine Learning or Computer Science, or equivalent industry experience. 

Professional Experience 

Necessary: 

• Strong communication and collaboration skills for effective cross-functional teamwork. 

• Ability to navigate ambiguity and drive projects in rapidly evolving research areas. 

• Exceptional problem-solving and troubleshooting skills to tackle complex technical challenges.  

Preferred: 

• Experience in building and optimizing large-scale video data pipelines. 

• Experience with large scale video curation. 

• Experience with data filtering, particularly AI-generated content detection and duplicate detection. 

• Experience with image or video data annotation.  

• Experience with video data curriculum. 

• Strong systems and engineering expertise in deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch. 

• Research contributions to top-tier conferences or journals (e.g., ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, ACL, CVPR, COLM, etc.), with published work in relevant domains.  

Benefits Include

*Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision benefits 

*Bonus

*401K Plan

*Generous paid time off, sick leave and holidays

*Paid Parental Leave

*Employee Assistance Program

*Life insurance and disability

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.