Chief Science Officer

You will own the end-to-end research direction for vision-language-action models, world models, planning, robot learning, data strategy, compute, evaluation, and policy redeployment. You will build and lead the research organisation, make research investment decisions, establish evaluation standards, and bring validated results into live robot deployments. You will also represent the scientific work with customers, partners, universities, investors, and leading research venues.

Responsibilities

• Set the research agenda for vision-language-action models, world models, planning, robot interaction learning, and generalization
• Make research investment decisions across people, compute, and technical directions
• Own the data strategy across deployment, teleoperation, open-source, and synthetic data
• Own the compute strategy for large-scale training and real-time robot inference
• Build evaluation benchmarks that predict customer-operation performance
• Build and lead the research organisation in Zurich and Stuttgart
• Set the hiring bar for research talent
• Bring research results into production with engineering
• Decide what to publish, open-source, or patent with the founders
• Represent the scientific work with customers, partners, universities, and investors
• Partner with technology, product, and operations leadership on research and deployment

Requirements

• Leadership experience in robot learning or embodied AI research
• Experience with vision-language-action models, imitation learning or reinforcement learning, or world models
• Experience building a research team
• Experience deploying work on real robots, ideally outside the lab for extended periods
• Strong scientific record at leading research venues
• Experience making research, data, and compute investment decisions
• Ability to explain scientific work to engineers, customers, and investors
• PhD in machine learning, robotics, or a related field, or equivalent track record

Benefits

• Meaningful equity
• Relocation support
• Large-scale compute