---
title: 'Member of Technical Staff, Diffusion World Models & Robotics at Odyssey'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-diffusion-world-models-robotics-odyssey-zurich-mkshmg0n3fgw'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Member of Technical Staff, Diffusion World Models & Robotics at Odyssey

- **Company:** Odyssey
- **Location:** Zurich, Switzerland
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-07-14
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/odysseyml/b1b14f9e-8764-4f9e-9796-374ffdbac72b

## 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 are looking for people with a deep interest in improving machine learning algorithms at the intersection of diffusion world models, robotics simulation, and model-based agents. You should be drawn to the bet: that a model learned from the breadth of the real world covers the scenes, sensors, and situations no hand-built simulator enumerates, and generalizes to the ones nobody thought to model. You will build and use world models as simulators, feature extractors, and training grounds for real robot policies and autonomous driving stacks, latent imagination, planning and search, model-based RL. Interactive, action-conditioned world models are a cutting-edge research area that is not yet mature, so you will be working at the cusp of what’s possible. You will get the hardest version of it: dense multi-agent traffic, long horizons, surround sensing, and safety cases nobody can collect enough real miles for, the problem our founders spent a decade on. Most new experiments here will fail; your focus will be on maximally learning from failed experiments to increase the chances of eventual success on real hardware.

## What you'll do

- Learn what makes interactive world models tick. How data, diffusion backbones, action conditioning, and downstream robot and driving policies interact.
- Push on what makes a world model usable as a robotics simulator: rollout horizon, temporal and physical consistency, controllability, multi-view and multi-sensor coherence (surround cameras, depth, lidar, proprioception), and drift under the policy's own actions.
- Implement state-of-the-art diffusion, model-based RL, and robot-learning algorithms, and design losses, reward functions, and reinforcement / preference-based fine-tuning for interactivity and policy performance.
- Train policies inside the model, latent imagination, planning, search, and close the loop by measuring them on real robots and in closed-loop driving evaluation.
- Run a high cadence of ablations across world model and policy, from architecture and feature taps to data mixes and conditioning schemes.
- Build the bridge to real robots and vehicles: data pipelines, world model fine-tuning, and policy deployment onto Robots-aaS and design partner systems (remote and face-to-face).
- Exploit the latest features on modern GPUs to increase training and inference efficiency.
- Take ownership of the full ML stack, including core frameworks that Odyssey researchers and product engineers rely on.

## Who you are

- A PhD (or equivalent research experience) plus 2+ years of relevant research or engineering experience, or 4+ years of software engineering experience with 2+ years of relevant ML work.
- Significant hands-on experience with one or more of: model-based RL (e.g. the Dreamer lineage), learned simulators for robotics or driving, diffusion and video generative models, RL and planning, or vision-language-action (VLA) policies.
- Comfortable reasoning about a policy and the model it acts in as one system, rather than owning only one side of the interface.
- Track record of owning projects end to end.
- Not shy to touch any stage of an ML pipeline, from data to real-robot and in-vehicle deployment; sim-to-real experience is a strong plus.
- Autonomous driving, or another safety-critical embodied domain, is a plus.
- Proficiency with PyTorch (or TF/JAX).
- Highly experiment driven.
- Flexible to work in-person in Zurich, London, or the Bay Area. Most of the team works in-person in Zurich at the moment.

## 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, Applied Research](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-applied-research-odyssey-palo-alto-k90agz5z47tm) — Palo Alto, CA
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- [AI Resident](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-resident-odyssey-palo-alto-rkf461yxgdzs) — Palo Alto, CA