---
title: 'Member of Technical Staff, Applied Research at Odyssey'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-applied-research-odyssey-palo-alto-k90agz5z47tm'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Member of Technical Staff, Applied Research at Odyssey

- **Company:** Odyssey
- **Location:** Palo Alto, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-08-12
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/odysseyml/f67b1e4e-fcc4-494c-96d3-c7a73182cc7e

## Job description

## Who we are

[Odyssey](https://odyssey.ml) is an AI lab pioneering general world models: causal, multimodal systems that learn to predict and interact with the world over long horizons. This foundational technology promises to revolutionize robotics, science, healthcare, education, gaming, defense, and beyond. Odyssey’s founders previously pioneered the most complex application of physical AI: self-driving cars. They’ve now brought together a world-class research team from DeepMind, Tesla, Waymo, Meta, Apple, and Wayve, who have made significant contributions to language models (DeepMind Gemini), video models (DeepMind Veo), world models (Wayve GAIA), and autonomous systems (Tesla FSD). Odyssey has raised significant venture capital from GV, Amazon, AMD, EQT, NVIDIA, Natural Capital, In-Q-Tel, Elad Gil, Jeff Dean, Guillermo Rauch, Garry Tan, Kyle Vogt, and researchers from OpenAI, DeepMind, MSL, Recursive, and Thinking Machines.

## What we're looking for

We hire deeply technical staff working in world models, video generation, multimodal, robotics, autonomous vehicles, and adjacent fields. Applied Research sits where the models meet real applications. Whether you're building from scratch, scaling training runs, or working on inference, we hire people who can take an idea and make it real.

## What you’ll do

- Push what world models can do past where current diffusion and transformer approaches stop, with an emphasis on conditioning and control. That might mean new architectures, new training paradigms, or new ways of representing time, dynamics, and interaction.
- Train the conditioning methods and control policies that give real handles on generation: action, camera, physics, style, and the long-horizon consistency that holds them together.
- Take ideas from hypothesis through experiment to working prototype, grounded in a concrete application.
- Design and run the experiments, distributed training, and inference systems that make breakthroughs possible, and ship the results into models real users touch.
- Define what "controllable" means in measurable terms. Build the evals that tell us whether a method holds up in the applications it's meant for, not just on a held-out set.
- Work shoulder-to-shoulder across research, engineering, and product. Strong work here is recognized by all sides as theirs.
- Contribute to the lab's scientific and engineering culture: publishing where it matters, building tools that outlast the project, and engaging with the broader community shaping this field.

## Who you are

- Deeply technical, with a track record in world models, generative modeling, video, multimodal learning, large-scale ML systems, or adjacent areas. Experience with conditioning, controllability, or learned control policies is a strong signal. You've either originated work that moved the field, shipped systems at scale, or both.
- Comfortable working from first principles. You can define a problem, design experiments to test it, and build the minimal system that proves what's possible.
- Fluent across the research-to-application gap. You care how and why models work, and you care that they hold up under real constraints, on real content, at real latency.
- Energized by ambiguity. You've operated in areas without precedent and built the tools, frameworks, and patterns as you went.
- Have a real view on where this field needs to go next, and can defend it. "Bigger model, more compute" isn't an answer that lands here.
- Thrive in small, focused teams that value autonomy, speed, and tight collaboration over process.
- Excited to help define a new medium, how AI perceives, learns, and interacts through pixels, over the next decade.

## About Odyssey

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Odyssey is an AI lab pioneering general-purpose world models—causal, interactive, real-time simulations that learn from video and multimodal data to enable new forms of intelligence.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B, raised $310M)
- **Headquarters**: Palo Alto, California, United States (also offices in London, England and Zurich, Switzerland) [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/odyssey-odysseyml)
- **Founded**: 2023 [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/odyssey-odysseyml)
- **Founders**: Oliver Cameron (Co-Founder & CEO), Jeff Hawke (Co-Founder & CTO) [odyssey.ml/careers](https://odyssey.ml/careers)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Artificial intelligence, machine learning, world modeling, robotics, simulation.
- **Target customers**: B2B (developers, enterprises in robotics, gaming, healthcare, advertising, retail, defense) and B2C (future consumer applications like interactive entertainment, personal assistants, immersive fitness).
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "We learn the world to make it better." [odyssey.ml/about](https://odyssey.ml/about)

## Products & Services
- **[Odyssey-2](https://odyssey.ml/)**: A general-purpose world model that generates minutes-long, interactive, real-time simulations from text or image prompts. It streams frame-by-frame and can be interacted with by multiple participants (human or AI). Designed for applications in robotics rehearsal, gaming, interactive advertising, virtual try-ons, and more.
- **[Agora-1](https://odyssey.ml/about)**: A multi-agent world model enabling multiple participants—human or AI—to share and interact within the same world simulation in real-time. Built on a novel RL-driven adversarial framework to improve world model performance.
- **[Starchild-1](https://odyssey.ml/about)**: The first real-time multimodal world model, going beyond visual observation to learn from richer multimodal interaction with the world.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: $310M Series B funding (latest round) [odyssey.ml/about](https://odyssey.ml/about)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Backed by Jeff Dean (Chief Scientist, DeepMind), Soumith Chintala (CTO, Thinking Machines), Max Jaderberg (President, Isomorphic Labs) [odyssey.ml/careers](https://odyssey.ml/careers); also advised/invested by Tim Rocktäschel (Co-Founder, Recursive) [odyssey.ml/careers](https://odyssey.ml/careers)
- **Growth Signals**: Rapid hiring (16+ open roles across research, engineering, product, policy, HR, and operations) [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/odysseyml); launched breakthrough world models (Odyssey-2, Agora-1, Starchild-1); offices in 3 global tech hubs; employee headcount growing ~33% year-over-year (approx. 37–46 employees) [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/odysseyml) [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/odyssey-odysseyml)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Pioneering approach**: Odyssey is one of the first labs to focus exclusively on general-purpose world models, shifting beyond language models to simulate physics, causality, and intelligence.
- **Top-tier talent**: Team recruited from leading AI labs (DeepMind, Meta, Waymo, Cruise, Wayve) and companies like Apple and Roblox [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/odysseyml).
- **Compute & infrastructure**: Building inference infrastructure capable of scaling to hundreds of thousands of users within a year while minimizing TFLOPS per user [odyssey.ml/careers](https://odyssey.ml/careers).
- **Research output**: Publicly released state-of-the-art models (Odyssey-2, Agora-1, Starchild-1) that materially advance physical accuracy and interactivity in world models [odyssey.ml](https://odyssey.ml/).

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Scaling world model inference for real-time, interactive consumer and enterprise products; pushing research boundaries in multimodal learning, reinforcement learning, and multi-agent simulation; building the "financial engine" for a compute-intensive AI business (capital allocation, unit economics) [odyssey.ml/careers](https://odyssey.ml/careers).
- **Direction for growth**: Applying world models to robotics (sim-to-real rehearsal), gaming, healthcare, advertising, retail, defense, education, and personal assistant systems. Aiming to "proliferate interactive intelligence into the world" [odyssey.ml](https://odyssey.ml/).

## Why Work Here
- **Culture and autonomy**: Odyssey prizes "autonomy and ownership" – deep work with accountability, and the freedom to tackle meaningful, open-ended scientific problems [odyssey.ml/careers](https://odyssey.ml/careers).
- **Team**: Collaborate with researchers and engineers from leading labs who have driven major AI advancements. Strong peer group focused on original science [odyssey.ml/careers](https://odyssey.ml/careers).
- **Work policy**: Hybrid model – employees work from physical offices in Palo Alto, London, or Zurich. No remote-only option; typical time on-site not specified [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/odyssey-odysseyml).
- **Compensation & benefits**: Competitive salary and equity grants reflecting the demands of breakthrough AI research. Benefits include healthcare, disability insurance, 401(k), generous parental leave, PTO, company socials, and wellness initiatives [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/odyssey-odysseyml).
- **Notable for job seekers**: Rapidly scaling (raised $310M, hiring across research, engineering, product, and operations). Opportunity to shape a nascent category (world models) from the ground up.

## Sources
1. [odyssey.ml/careers](https://odyssey.ml/careers) – Careers page with team, culture, and benefits details.
2. [odyssey.ml/about](https://odyssey.ml/about) – About page with mission, funding, and model announcements.
3. [odyssey.ml](https://odyssey.ml/) – Homepage with product descriptions and applications.
4. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/odyssey-odysseyml) – Built In company profile with employee count, perks, and office locations.
5. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/odysseyml) – LinkedIn company page with headcount, growth, and talent sources.

## Other roles at Odyssey

- [Controller](https://feeny.ai/job/controller-odyssey-palo-alto-1anypxk5yk02) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Member of Technical Staff, Infrastructure Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-infrastructure-engineer-odyssey-palo-alto-78e1qwcgzrya) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Research Internship](https://feeny.ai/job/research-internship-odyssey-palo-alto-v0rv7s8cfzfd) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Executive Business Partner](https://feeny.ai/job/executive-business-partner-odyssey-london-dgfbmxp8z5zn) — London, United Kingdom
- [Member of Technical Staff, Data Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-data-engineering-odyssey-palo-alto-n16zsqmcv70j) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Member of Technical Staff, Foundation Models](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-foundation-models-odyssey-palo-alto-0h5g5ayn20dg) — Palo Alto, CA
- [VP, Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/vp-engineering-odyssey-palo-alto-tka73j1qbv60) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Member of Technical Staff, TLM: Research Scientist](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-tlm-research-scientist-odyssey-palo-alto-8d6e4yxm6gc9) — Palo Alto, CA
- [AI Resident](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-resident-odyssey-palo-alto-rkf461yxgdzs) — Palo Alto, CA
- [VP, Research](https://feeny.ai/job/vp-research-odyssey-london-dsxjptdqvpfn) — London, United Kingdom