---
title: 'Research Member of Technical Staff - Data & Evaluation at Rhoda AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/research-member-of-technical-staff-data-evaluation-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-ywt3xxnh6gs4'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-14'
---

# Research Member of Technical Staff - Data & Evaluation at Rhoda AI

- **Company:** Rhoda AI
- **Location:** Mountain View, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-05-27
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-14
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/rhoda-ai/56f6d647-0867-485b-ab0d-2f30c8aedffa/application

**Skills:** Data-centric ML, Large-scale video data pipelines, Video data ingestion, Video data filtering, Video data deduplication, Video data quality scoring, Machine Learning, Generative Models, Model Evaluation, Python, WebVid, HowTo100M, Ego4D, Video generation quality metrics, FVD, Perceptual quality metrics, Motion consistency metrics, VLM, CLIP-style inference, Automated video filtering

> Build data and evaluation foundations for a video action model, including web-scale video data curation, annotation pipelines, and evaluation methodologies. The role involves designing scalable pipelines, developing benchmarks for video generation quality, and deploying vision-language models to support robotic cont...

## Job description

At Rhoda AI, we’re building the next generation of generalist intelligent robots. We own the full robotics stack from high-performance hardware and robot systems to the infrastructure and state-of-the-art foundation world models that control our robots. Our robots are designed to be generalists capable of operating in complex, real-world environments and handling long-tail edge cases, made possible by our cutting edge research and end-to-end system design. We've raised over $450M and are investing aggressively in model research, infrastructure, hardware development, and manufacturing scale-up to make generalist robotics a reality. We're looking for Research Scientists and Research Engineers to build the data and evaluation foundations for our video action model. This team owns web-scale video data curation, annotation pipelines, and evaluation methodology — directly determining the quality of the video pretraining distribution and how clearly we can measure model progress. We hire across levels — from MTS-Staff

## What You'll Do

- Design and implement scalable curation pipelines for web-scale video pretraining data: ingestion, deduplication, quality filtering, and content classification across internet-scale video corpora
- Develop video-specific annotation frameworks and quality filters — motion quality, scene diversity, action content, temporal coherence — to improve pretraining signal
- Build evaluation frameworks and benchmarks to measure causal video model capabilities: prediction quality, temporal coherence, long-horizon rollout fidelity, and downstream robot task performance
- Research and implement data selection, mixing, and weighting strategies that improve video generation quality and transfer to robotic control
- Deploy and scale vision-language models (VLMs) and video understanding models for automated annotation, filtering, and content scoring at web scale
- Collaborate closely with pre-training and post-training teams to ensure data quality and evaluation methodology drive research decisions
- Track model capability trends across training runs, catching regressions and surfacing improvements early

## What We're Looking For

- Strong understanding of data-centric ML and how web video data quality affects large generative model performance
- Experience building large-scale video data pipelines: ingestion, filtering, deduplication, and quality scoring
- Familiarity with video-specific data characteristics: temporal structure, motion quality, scene diversity, and action content
- Solid ML fundamentals with hands-on experience training or evaluating large generative models
- Ability to design evaluations for video generation models that are diagnostic, reproducible, and actionable
- Staff-level candidates are expected to define technical direction and drive research strategy independently; senior/MTS candidates execute complex projects with strong fundamentals and growing scope

## Nice to Have (But Not Required)

- PhD or strong research background in ML, computer vision, or a related field
- Experience with large-scale web video dataset curation (e.g., WebVid, HowTo100M, Ego4D, or similar)
- Familiarity with video generation quality metrics (FVD, perceptual quality, motion consistency)
- Experience running VLM or CLIP-style inference at scale for automated video filtering and annotation
- Prior work on evaluation methodology for video generation or world models
- Understanding of how web video data properties connect to downstream robotic action prediction
- Publication record at NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, or related venues

## Why This Role

- The video curation and evaluation rigor you build directly determines pretraining quality and research iteration speed for the entire team
- Build the benchmark infrastructure that gives the team an honest signal of model progress toward real robot performance
- High leverage: improvements to data quality compound across every training run
- Work at the intersection of large-scale systems and generative model research with visibility across all model development

## About Rhoda AI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Rhoda AI builds robot foundation models that learn from internet-scale video to enable manipulation-capable robots to generalize in real-world industrial environments.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed + Series A; $680M total funding)
- **Headquarters**: Palo Alto, CA, United States
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Jagdeep Singh (CEO), Eric Chan (Chief Scientist), Changan Chen (Chief Research Officer), Andrew Wooten, Gordon Wetzstein (Scientific Advisor) [rhoda.ai/team](https://www.rhoda.ai/team)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Hardware
- **Target customers**: B2B – industrial enterprises in automotive, manufacturing, logistics, and e-commerce
- **Mission/purpose**: “Building at the frontier of embodied intelligence” and “Designing intelligence for the real world” – deploying general-purpose robot foundation models that adapt to the variability of commercial and industrial environments. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/) | [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhoda-ai)

## Products & Services
- **Rhoda Robot Platform (Hardware + Software)**: A turnkey robotic system with custom actuators (25kg rated, 40kg peak payload), safety-rated vision, wheel-base, and brakes in every actuator. The platform runs the **Direct Video Action** model, which pre-trains on over a million real-world videos and post-trains on task-specific robot data. Long-context windows enable single-shot learning from human demonstrations without retraining. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)
- **FutureVision Intelligence Layer**: A proprietary architecture that handles real-world industrial tasks autonomously by generalizing beyond conventional VLA pipelines. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)
- **Deployment Services**: End-to-end solutions for tasks such as returns processing, bearing decanting, container breakdown, and material transport in logistics and e-commerce facilities. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding **$680M** – Seed round $67.4M (April 2024), Series A $162.6M (April 2025), and Series A $450M (March 2026) with 4 investors. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhoda-ai)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not individually named in available sources; partners include customers in automotive, manufacturing, logistics, and e-commerce. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount growth of **+20% monthly** (LinkedIn reports 55 employees; Built In reports 73 employees – conflicting data). Talent sourced from companies like QuantumScape, Flexiv Robotics, Scale AI, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, and Stanford University. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhoda-ai) | [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/rhoda-ai)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Direct Video Action architecture** with web-scale video pre-training gives a strong prior on motion, physics, and dynamics, enabling generalization beyond lab settings.
- **Custom high-performance actuators** (25kg rated, 40kg peak) with safety-rated brakes and vision – designed for 3+ years of continuous operation at rated payload.
- **Long-context in-context learning** allows the robot to perform tasks single-shot from human demonstrations without retraining.
- **Turnkey industrial deployments** that handle ambiguity and variability (e.g., debris, transparent bags, heavy boxes) – tasks customers initially believed could not be automated. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)

## Strategic Focus
- Scaling robot intelligence through a pre-training/post-training paradigm, moving from controlled labs to reliable production environments.
- Expanding commercial deployments across automotive, manufacturing, logistics, and e-commerce verticals.
- Pursuing a path to **physical AGI** by combining foundation models with custom hardware for real-world adaptability. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: “Building at the frontier of embodied intelligence” – emphasis on hard problems, first-principles thinking, and category-defining systems. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhoda-ai)
- **Work policy**: Hybrid workspace (employees combine remote and on-site work), with offices in Mountain View and Palo Alto, CA. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/rhoda-ai)
- **Engineering culture**: Strong research focus (Chief Research Officer, Chief Scientist, many research engineers/scientists). Recent job postings include Research Scientist, Robot Perception Engineer, Mechanical Engineer, Fullstack Engineer, and Product Manager. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/rhoda-ai)
- **Notable perks**: Not explicitly listed, but the company is well-funded ($680M) and at an early stage (founded 2024), offering significant growth opportunity and impact.

## Sources
1. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/) – Company website (product, technology, commercial applications)
2. [rhoda.ai/careers](https://www.rhoda.ai/careers) – Careers page
3. [rhoda.ai/team](https://www.rhoda.ai/team) – Leadership team and co-founders
4. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/rhoda-ai) – Built In profile (employee count, offices, job listings, hybrid policy)
5. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhoda-ai) – LinkedIn company page (funding, headcount, executive list, talent sources)

## Other roles at Rhoda AI

- [Staff Product Manager- Robot & Fleet Interfaces](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-product-manager-robot-fleet-interfaces-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-sw5va827cxvb) — Mountain View, CA
- [Associate Engineering Product Manager- Robot Data Systems](https://feeny.ai/job/associate-engineering-product-manager-robot-data-systems-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-p6pw133hymk0) — Mountain View, CA
- [Robot Software Engineer Internship](https://feeny.ai/job/robot-software-engineer-internship-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-3s3s0rkqmbkw) — Mountain View, CA
- [Social Media & Content Lead- AI Research](https://feeny.ai/job/social-media-content-lead-ai-research-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-09kzs6nda5w7) — Mountain View, CA
- [Research Member of Technical Staff- Training Systems](https://feeny.ai/job/research-member-of-technical-staff-training-systems-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-n7d7bvemaev0) — Mountain View, CA
- [Field Robotics Deployment Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/field-robotics-deployment-lead-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-v91gfb5byq4a) — Mountain View, CA
- [Senior UX/UI Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-ux-ui-designer-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-tb6zs4gkw722) — Mountain View, CA
- [Staff Thermal Systems Integration Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-thermal-systems-integration-engineer-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-h0adk89xs839) — Mountain View, CA
- [Robotics Test Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/robotics-test-engineer-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-fawz7jcaj9pv) — Mountain View, CA
- [Senior Hardware Reliability Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-hardware-reliability-engineer-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-tb5a3r2wpf2a) — Mountain View, CA