Research Engineer

About this role

Hedra is seeking a Research Engineer to develop and deploy action-conditioned world models and vision-language-action systems that bridge generative AI with real-world physical applications. You'll lead pre-training and post-training efforts, collaborate with industrial partners, and contribute publishable research at the intersection of generative modeling and robotics.

What you'll do

• Design and implement pre-training and post-training pipelines for action-conditioned world models and VLA systems
• Develop training methodologies including fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and large-scale multimodal learning
• Create training and evaluation datasets from simulation with domain randomization and sim-to-real transfer strategies
• Build distributed training infrastructure using PyTorch, FSDP, and DeepSpeed
• Process multimodal data pipelines integrating video, sensory inputs, and action sequences
• Partner with industrial clients to adapt models for real-world physical AI deployment

What they're looking for

• Pre-training and post-training of large generative models
• PyTorch and distributed training frameworks (FSDP, DeepSpeed)
• Machine learning optimization and large-scale data processing
• Vision-language models (VLMs) and world models
• Video understanding and temporal reasoning
• Robotics or embodied AI systems
• Sim-to-real transfer techniques
• Multimodal learning architectures

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and equity
• Health insurance (Medical PPO, Vision, Dental)
• 401(k) retirement plan
• Office lunch and snacks