Senior Member of Technical Staff: Multimodal Post-Training
Walden Robotics · Cambridge, MA · 2 mo ago
EngineeringFull-time
About the role
You'll be a senior technical leader shaping how our foundation models become capable, aligned robot policies. Working alongside our AI leadership and a world-class team, you'll drive key work across supervised fine-tuning (SFT), preference optimization (RLHF/DPO-style), distillation, and reinforcement learning (RL). Success will be measured by policies that act more reliably on real robots in the real world.
Responsibilities
- Post-Training Strategy: Help shape the post-training recipe—SFT, preference tuning (RLHF/DPO-style), distillation, and RL—and own key stages of how each turns a strong base model into a deployable policy.
- Reasoning, Tool Use & Multimodality: Push grounded reasoning, tool use, and multimodal understanding for models that must act in the physical world, not only answer.
- Behavior & Alignment: Align model behavior with product and safety requirements across diverse tasks and embodiments.
- Evaluation Methodology: Strengthen the eval and experimentation methodology that separates real gains from noise—spanning offline metrics and on-robot performance.
- Technical Leadership: Set the technical bar for post-training, mentor the team, and partner with data teams on what data most improves behavior.
Requirements
- Post-Training Depth: Deep hands-on experience post-training large multimodal models—SFT, RLHF/DPO-style preference methods, distillation—with results you have shipped or published.
- Reinforcement Learning: Strong command of RL for large models (reward modeling, policy optimization) and its practical failure modes.
- Frontier-Scale Models: Experience working with multimodal LLMs or vision-language-action (VLA) models at frontier scale.
- Program Ownership: A record of owning end-to-end model-improvement programs and setting technical direction others follow.
- Measurement & Grounding: Excellent judgment about what to measure, and the instinct to debug across the stack.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with embodied AI, robotics, or vision-language-action models (or strong desire to move from LLMs into the physical world).
- Familiarity with evaluating open-ended, real-world task performance.
- Contributions to influential models, papers, or open-source post-training stacks.
Benefits
- Competitive total compensation program, including salary, annual cash bonus, and company equity.
- Company-subsidized insurance programs.
- 401(k) with company match.
- Flexible PTO.
- Daily lunch.