Job Description

About the Team

Centific’s Robotics and Physical AI Lab is pioneering the fusion of simulation-first research , embodied intelligence , and multimodal perception .

Our mission: accelerate the transition from vision and language understanding to real-world action , enabling next-generation robots, agents, and safety systems across industries.

We’re assembling a cross-functional team of engineers, researchers, and interns exploring vision-language models (VLMs) , world models , and sim2real transfer .

As our Lead Research Scientist , you will steer this effort—bridging academic rigor with hands-on experimentation, guiding early-stage researchers, and converting scientific breakthroughs into deployable AI systems.

🎯 Mission

Drive the scientific and technical direction of Centific’s Physical AI and Robotics R&D .

Lead by example—mentoring a team of interns and engineers while collaborating across simulation, perception, and multimodal AI.

🔬 What You’ll Do

Leadership & Mentorship

• Lead a team of 3–5 Ph.D. interns and engineers across perception, multimodal reasoning, and simulation projects.
• Architect and maintain a collaborative research roadmap with measurable milestones and publishable outcomes.
• Foster a culture of open research, reproducibility, and iterative learning.

Research & Development

• Define and execute high-impact research in embodied AI , world models , and vision-language reasoning .
• Integrate digital twins, Isaac Sim, MuJoCo , or other simulators for real-world policy validation and sim2real adaptation.
• Advance multimodal model design —from grounding and affordance recognition to causal and temporal reasoning.
• Explore data-efficient training , spatially aware neural architectures , and robustness evaluation frameworks .

System Integration & Deployment

• Collaborate with platform engineers to deploy research artifacts into scalable services using Ray, FastAPI, Docker, and Kubernetes .
• Benchmark large-scale inference pipelines, model distillation strategies, and safety validation workflows.
• Publish open-source code and internal benchmarks that raise the scientific bar.

Collaboration

• Partner with the Principal Architect, simulation teams, and external research collaborators.
• Lead proof-of-concept integrations with simulation or robotics hardware vendors.
• Represent Centific in academic conferences and consortiums on AI, simulation, and robotics.

📚 Minimum Qualifications

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, Robotics, or related field , with a strong publication record in CVPR/ICCV/ECCV, NeurIPS/ICLR/CoRL/RSS , or equivalent.
• 5+ years of postdoctoral or industry research experience in computer vision, simulation, multimodal reasoning, or spatial AI .
• Deep expertise in PyTorch or JAX , GPU-accelerated workloads , and distributed training .
• Proven record of mentoring junior researchers or leading interdisciplinary R&D projects.
• Experience with Isaac Sim, Open3D, PyTorch3D, or MuJoCo for digital-twin and behavior simulation.
• Strong understanding of statistical spatial modeling , RL/MPC policy learning , and world-model architectures .

🌟 Preferred Qualifications

• Publications or patents in spatially-aware neural networks , multimodal world modeling , or simulation-based training .
• Experience implementing Ray-based distributed training or Triton/TensorRT-based inference optimizations .
• Familiarity with trustworthy AI , explainability in autonomous systems , or safety validation for robotics .
• Contributions to open-source frameworks (e.g., OpenMMLab, Isaac Sim assets, Habitat, Omniverse pipelines ).
• History of academic collaboration or joint research programs with universities or labs.

🧩 What Success Looks Like

• Delivery of reproducible, publishable, and deployable research outcomes that strengthen Centific’s Physical AI IP portfolio.
• Mentorship that grows the capabilities and confidence of your team.
• Leadership that balances curiosity-driven research with product-driven execution .
• Demonstrable impact on simulation realism, policy robustness, and model generalization.

⚙️ Our Stack

Modeling: PyTorch, JAX, Hugging Face, xFormers

Simulation: Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, Open3D, COLMAP, 3DGS/NeRF

Systems: Python, Ray, FastAPI, Kubernetes, Docker, Triton, Weights & Biases

Multimodal AI: CLIP, SAM, LLaVA, Cosmos-Reason, Vision-Language Transformers

Data & Evaluation: Omniverse USD pipelines, world-model benchmarks, synthetic-to-real datasets

🚀 Why Join Centific

• Lead the frontier: Shape a new discipline at the intersection of AI, simulation, and robotics.
• Mentor the next generation: Guide emerging researchers working on cutting-edge multimodal and embodied AI problems.
• Ship your science: See your research power real systems across safety, healthcare, and smart environments.
• Collaborate with industry leaders: Work with NVIDIA, Microsoft, and the global Physical AI community.

Centific is an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, age, mental or physical disability, medical condition, sex (including pregnancy), gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital status, familial status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.

Job Tags

Similar Jobs