Applied Research Scientist – Technical Staff

About the role

Rhoda AI is seeking Applied Research Scientists and Research Engineers to adapt its foundation world models for specific customer applications across industries such as logistics and manufacturing. This customer‑facing position bridges cutting‑edge research with real‑world deployment, ensuring model adaptations deliver measurable improvements.

Key responsibilities

• Collaborate directly with customers to translate application requirements into concrete model adaptation strategies.
• Fine‑tune and adapt foundation world models for domain‑specific tasks, environments, and operational constraints.
• Design and execute experiments to evaluate model performance against customer‑defined success criteria.
• Build evaluation benchmarks and testing frameworks to validate model behavior in real customer environments.
• Identify capability gaps and drive research to close them, feeding insights back to the core research team.

Required profile

• Strong ML research and engineering background with hands‑on experience fine‑tuning large models.
• Ability to move fluidly between customer requirements and technical implementation.
• Excellent communication skills for explaining technical findings to both technical and non‑technical stakeholders.
• Experience in a customer‑facing, applied research, or solutions engineering role.

Required skills

• Fine‑tuning and adapting large models (LLMs, VLMs, policy models).
• Modern ML pipelines: pre‑training, fine‑tuning, evaluation, deployment.
• Inference optimization and runtime constraints (latency, memory, hardware targets).
• Sim‑to‑real transfer and robotics deployment experience.