Applied Research Scientist / Engineer - Deployment

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 Applied Research Scientists and Research Engineers to take our foundation world models and adapt them for specific customer applications and industry use cases. We hire across levels — from senior/MTS to staff. This is a customer-facing role at the intersection of research and deployment — you'll work directly with partners and end users to understand their needs, translate them into model adaptations, and deliver measurable improvements in real-world settings across industries like logistics, manufacturing, and beyond. What You'll Do Work directly with customers and partners to understand application requirements and translate them into concrete model adaptation strategies Fine-tune and adapt our foundation world models for domain-specific tasks, environments, and operational constraints Design and run targeted experiments to evaluate model performance against customer-defined success criteria Build application-specific evaluation benchmarks and testing frameworks to validate model behavior in real customer environments Identify gaps between general-purpose model capabilities and the requirements of specific use cases, and drive research to close them Collaborate with the core research team to surface patterns and insights from customer deployments that inform foundational model development Communicate technical findings clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders What We're Looking For Strong ML research and engineering skills with hands-on experience fine-tuning or adapting large models Ability to move fluidly between customer requirements and technical implementation Solid understanding of modern ML pipelines: pre-training, fine-tuning, evaluation, and deployment Comfort working across teams — research, engineering, and customer-facing functions Strong communication skills: ability to explain model behavior and tradeoffs to non-technical audiences Experience in a customer-facing, applied research, or solutions engineering role 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) Experience adapting foundation models (LLMs, VLMs, or policy models) to domain-specific applications Familiarity with one or more relevant verticals (e.g., logistics, manufacturing, warehouse automation, agriculture) Familiarity with inference optimization and runtime constraints (latency, memory, hardware targets) — sufficient to work alongside inference engineers, not own it Experience with sim-to-real transfer or adapting models trained in one environment to operate in another Hands-on experience with real robot deployments in production or near-production settings PhD or strong research background in ML, Robotics, or a related field Why This Role Rare combination of research depth and direct customer impact — you see your work matter in the real world Surface insights from real-world deployments that feed back into foundational model development Work across industries and applications with significant variety in problems and environments High visibility within the company as the bridge between our core models and the customers who use them #J-18808-Ljbffr Rhoda AI