# Senior Research Scientist - Robotics Foundation Models - Company: [Maxinsights]() - Location: Santa Clara - Team: Engineering - Employment type: Full Time - Posted: September 10, 2026 ## Job description ### Job Description: ## **About Maxinsights** Maxinsights is building the foundation layer for **Physical AI,** the intelligence that enables robots to perceive, reason, learn, and act in the real world. Our mission is to unlock scalable learning for robotics through **data and foundation models trained on real-world interaction**. We believe the next generation of robotics will be powered by such models, and we're building the data and intelligence layer to make that possible. ## **Role Overview** We are looking for a **world-class Senior Research Scientist** to define and lead our research agenda in **Robotics Foundation Models**. This is a highly research-oriented role with significant scientific autonomy and long-term impact. You will shape the direction of embodied AI at Maxinsights, lead research into large-scale multimodal models, and work at the intersection of **data, model architecture, and real-world robot interaction**. You will have the opportunity to pursue ambitious research questions, build new approaches to learning from embodied data, and turn fundamental advances into systems that can operate across a wide range of robotic platforms and tasks. ## **Core Research Areas** We are particularly interested in researchers with experience with the following: * **Robotics Foundation Models** trained on large-scale embodied data * **Vision-Language-Action (VLA)** models and architectures * **Egocentric learning** and first-person interaction modeling * **Action-conditioned world models** * **Cross-embodiment and cross-task generalization** * **Representation learning** for embodied intelligence * **Scaling laws** for embodied data, models, and policy learning * Large-scale **robotics training** and multimodal learning We are intentionally broad in scope and are excited by researchers who bring strong ideas that challenge conventional approaches to robotics learning. ## **What You'll Do** * Define and drive the **long-term research agenda** for Robotics Foundation Models at Maxinsights. * Lead research and large-scale training of **multimodal models spanning vision, language, and action**. * Shape the design, composition, and scaling strategy of our **embodied datasets**. * Develop novel approaches to learning representations and policies from large-scale real-world interaction data. * Investigate how foundation models can **generalize across robots, environments, tasks, and embodiments**. * Translate research ideas into scalable systems in close collaboration with engineering and robotics teams. * Publish high-impact research at leading venues such as **NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, RSS, CoRL, and ICRA**. * Mentor researchers and help establish the **scientific culture and research direction** of a world-class robotics organization. ## **Required Qualifications** * PhD in **Robotics, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Computer Science**, or a related field. * Deep research expertise in **robotics foundation models, embodied AI, multimodal learning, or a closely related area**. * Hands-on experience designing and training **large-scale multimodal or foundation models**. * Strong understanding of modern deep learning architectures, representation learning, and model scaling. * Strong publication record in leading machine learning, computer vision, or robotics conferences. * Demonstrated ability to **independently identify important research problems and drive them from idea to execution**. * Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively across research and engineering teams. ## **Preferred Background** * Experience at a leading AI or robotics research organization such as **OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta FAIR, Physical Intelligence**, or similar. * Hands-on experience with **VLA models, robotics pretraining, world models, or large-scale policy learning**. * Experience scaling distributed training using technologies such as **FSDP, DeepSpeed, Megatron, TPU**, or equivalent systems. * Experience working with **large-scale real-world robotics or egocentric datasets**. * A strong point of view on **representation learning, generalization, scaling, and the path toward general-purpose robotic intelligence**. * Track record of turning fundamental research into systems that work in real-world environments. ## **Why Maxinsights** This is an opportunity to work on one of the most important open problems with AI: **How do we build models that can learn general-purpose intelligence through interaction with the physical world?** You will have the autonomy to pursue ambitious research, access to significant computational and data resources, and the opportunity to shape both the **scientific direction and research culture** of the organization. If you are excited about defining the next generation of Robotics Foundation Models, and want to have a meaningful influence on how embodied intelligence evolves over the next decade, we encourage you to apply! # Default Benefits: * Health insurance * Vision care * Dental coverage * 401(k) * Paid holidays * PTO (Paid Time Off) * Sick leave ## Apply [Apply on Maxinsights]() Canonical job page: