Founding Research Scientist at stealth physical AI startup

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Job Title: Founding Research Scientist

Company Description: Stealth physical AI startup

Job Description:
You will lead the research function at a venture-backed startup solving the data bottleneck in robotics. By training end-to-end manipulation policies and designing evaluation frameworks, you will bridge the gap between high-quality real-world interaction data and model performance. This hands-on role offers significant equity and the chance to build a research stack from zero.

Location: San Francisco, USA

Why this role is remarkable:

- Rare opportunity to join as a founding member with minority co-founder level equity and full ownership of the research agenda.

- Work at the critical intersection of robotics and data infrastructure, solving the primary bottleneck preventing the scaling of physical AI.

- Collaborate directly with a technical founding team in a high-autonomy environment where you set the research direction and validation strategy.

What you will do:

- Train and evaluate real-world robot manipulation policies using imitation learning, diffusion policies, or vision-language-action models.

- Build the end-to-end data-to-policy validation pipeline to ensure high-quality tactile and interaction data translates to performance.

- Work alongside hardware and software teams to define the research roadmap and iterate on differentiated data collection methods.

The ideal candidate:

- Proven track record training manipulation policies on physical hardware, focusing on dexterous manipulation or tactile sensing.

- PhD from a top-tier ...