Robotic AI Engineer/Applied Scientist - Foundation Models

Company Overview

Maven Robotics is building the world’s leading general-purpose robots and providing physical AI solutions for the most challenging industrial autonomy tasks.

Operating in stealth, we are assembling a team of world-class innovators who think from first principles. Our mission is to achieve human-level task success rates in complex environments, even when faced with limited fine-tuning data or evolving robotic hardware. We value unwavering truth-seeking, humility, and relentless determination.

Role Description

We are seeking exceptional AI researchers and engineers to architect the neural backbone of our general-purpose robots. You will design the Vision-Language-Action (VLA) frameworks or Action World Models that allow our robots to reason, adapt, and succeed where traditional automation fails.

Note on Leveling

We are hiring across all levels (from early-career to staff/principal). You are not expected to be a master of every domain listed below; however, you must be able to justify world-class excellence in at least one core factor (e.g., model architecture, RL formulations, or high-scale data systems).

In this role, you will

• Architect Embodied Foundations: Design model architectures (VLA, World Models, etc.) that achieve ultra-high task success rates with minimal human demonstrations.
• Master Data Efficiency: Develop novel co-training strategies and efficient learning algorithms that leverage diverse data sources—from Internet-scale video to sparse, high-fidelity human interventions.
• Generalize Cross Embodiments: Build models capable of zero-shot or few-shot adaptation to new robot configurations, maintaining a high success rate even when proprietary hardware and actuation systems evolve.
• Innovate Real-World RL: Formulate and deploy novel Reinforcement Learning and policy extraction methods specifically designed for physical, real-world manipulation.
• Design the Data Loop: Collaborate on advanced data collection systems to capture critical human intervention data for model bootstrapping.

Qualifications

Must-have

• MS or PhD in CS, Robotics, Machine Learning, or a related field (or equivalent industry experience).
• Deep Technical Mastery: Advanced understanding of transformers, multi-modal alignment, and mapping perception to high-frequency motor control.
• Specialized Excellence: Proven ability to innovate—not just implement—within one or more areas: VLA models, Real-world RL, or large-scale Data Infrastructure.
• Software Excellence: Expert-level Python and deep familiarity with PyTorch or JAX

Nice-to-have

• A track record of high-impact publications (NeurIPS, ICRA, RSS, CVPR) or significant open-source contributions.
• Experience with large-scale distributed training and model compression.
• Experience with deployment of models to edge devices (NVIDIA Jetson/Orin) for real-time inference.
• General knowledge of robotics principles (kinematics, dynamics).

Why Maven Robotics?

You will be working on a unique in-house robot platform that is evolving alongside your models. We don't just want to reach 90% success; we are building the architectural breakthroughs required to reach 99.9% in the real world.