The Role

OpenMind is building the social intelligence layer for robotics: the models that let robots understand people, context, and norms well enough to work alongside humans safely. Our research agenda spans social world models, vision-language-action systems, cross-embodiment learning, and multi-robot orchestration. Our work is deployed on real robots with real customers within weeks, not years.

You will define and execute research that ships. You will have access to a continuous stream of real-world embodied deployment data, including egocentric video, state-action logs, and human-robot interaction at scale.

What You Will Do

• Conduct original research on social world models, VLA architectures, and embodied reasoning, and drive it from idea to deployed system

• Design data strategies that leverage our real-world deployment data for training and evaluation

• Build rigorous evaluations for socially intelligent behavior, including simulation-based benchmarks and real-world measurement

• Publish at top venues (CoRL, RSS, ICRA, NeurIPS) and represent OpenMind in the research community

• Collaborate directly with our platform and deployment teams so research lands on physical robots quickly

What We Look For

• MS or PhD in machine learning, robotics, or a related field, or equivalent research experience with a strong publication record

• Deep expertise in at least one of: world models, VLA models, imitation or reinforcement learning, multimodal foundation models

• Strong engineering fundamentals in languages such as Python, Go, and/or C++. You train your own models and write production-quality research code

• A bias toward research that survives contact with the real world

Nice to Have

• First-author publications at CoRL, RSS, ICRA, ICML, NeurIPS, or ICLR

• Experience deploying learned policies on physical hardware

• Prior work at a frontier AI lab or leading robotics research group