Hedra
Research Engineer
$175K–$275K
San Francisco · Full-time · Posted Apr 15, 2026
- Education
- BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a related field.
About the job
Designs and runs training pipelines and infrastructure for multimodal and action-conditioned models, evaluating them for real-world physical AI applications.
What you'll do
- Build pre-training and post-training pipelines for action-conditioned world models and vision-language-action models.
- Develop training methods and simulation-based datasets, including reinforcement learning and sim-to-real strategies.
- Build distributed training infrastructure and evaluate model performance using benchmarks and real-world deployment metrics.
What they ask for
- Experience with pre-training or post-training large generative models, such as video, multimodal, or action-conditioned models.
- Hands-on proficiency with PyTorch and distributed training frameworks (FSDP, DeepSpeed).
- Strong fundamentals in machine learning, optimization, and large-scale data processing.
- Familiarity with VLMs, VLAs, or world models.
Nice to have
- Background in robotics, embodied AI, or sim-to-real transfer.
- Experience with video understanding or temporal reasoning.
Pay
$175K – $275K USD base salary
Tools
PyTorch, FSDP, DeepSpeed
AI focus
Research and engineering for post-training, inference, and continuous improvement of multimodal and physical AI models, including reinforcement learning, world models, and vision-language-action models.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative