[Hiring] Research Scientist @Innodata

Role Description

Innodata is building the data and evaluation practice behind the next generation of robotics foundation models, in direct partnership with the customers and frontier labs defining that frontier. We are hiring a Research Scientist to own the science of that data.

You will partner directly with the customers and frontier labs building robot foundation models, as interested in the data those models learn from as in the models themselves. Your leverage is scientific judgment about data:

• Deciding what is worth capturing in the real world versus generating in simulation.
• How to weight a training mix across embodiments and sensors.
• How to measure whether a policy will hold up outside the lab.

Your conclusions will shape what our partners collect next.

You will define how Innodata designs, structures, and evaluates data for robot foundation models, and you will validate those choices experimentally. Concretely, you will:

• Translate the requirements of robotics foundation models into concrete data specifications.
• Decide what is worth capturing in the real world versus generating in simulation, and curate and weight training mixes across heterogeneous robot datasets.
• Guide collection across capture modalities and across synthetic pipelines.
• Build evaluation and benchmarking methodology that predicts real-world transfer.
• Run the experiments that prove it: fine-tune and evaluate foundation models on Innodata data.
• Design adversarial and long-horizon evaluations that surface where policies and world models break.
• Publish: turn what you learn into benchmarks, methodology, and papers.
• Collaborate with the capture lab, annotation teams, and the synthetic-data pipeline.

Qualifications

• Roughly 4+ years of hands-on industry experience in robot learning or robotics ML.
• A Bachelor's degree in computer science, electrical engineering, robotics, or a related technical field is required; an advanced degree (MS or PhD) in a relevant field is preferred.
• Trained and evaluated robot policies yourself — manipulation or locomotion via imitation learning or reinforcement learning — with strong PyTorch fundamentals.
• A way of thinking in datasets: curated, filtered, and weighted robot data across embodiments and sensors.
• Fluency in robotics data formats and standards — the LeRobot dataset format, RLDS, and Open X-Embodiment.
• Hands-on experience with simulation and synthetic data — NVIDIA Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, and Omniverse, or MuJoCo.
• Experience with teleoperation or egocentric data collection.
• A track record the field recognizes: first-author publications or strong open-source contributions.
• The ability to work directly with the research scientists at the customers and frontier labs.
• Bonus: interest or hands-on experience in responsible-AI evaluation and red-teaming for embodied systems.

Requirements

• The expected salary range for this position is $160,000 - $185,000 p/year, based on experience, skills, and qualifications.

Company Description

Innodata (Nasdaq: INOD) is a global data engineering company. We believe that data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are inextricably linked. Our mission is to enable the responsible advancement of artificial intelligence by providing the data, evaluation frameworks, and human expertise required to build AI systems that can be trusted at scale.

• We provide a range of transferable solutions, platforms, and services for Generative AI / AI builders and adopters.
• In every relationship, we honor our 36+ year legacy delivering the highest quality data and outstanding outcomes for our customers.