---
title: 'Research Member of Technical Staff- Data Infrastructure at Rhoda AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/research-member-of-technical-staff-data-infrastructure-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-4gypxyjqjwze'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-14'
---

# Research Member of Technical Staff- Data Infrastructure at Rhoda AI

- **Company:** Rhoda AI
- **Location:** Mountain View, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-05-17
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-14
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/rhoda-ai/c90321f2-5085-4f99-ac13-0de996ba1dd1/application

**Skills:** Distributed Systems, Data Pipelines, Cloud Storage, Database Management, Indexing Strategies, Observability, Monitoring, Software Engineering, Multimodal Datasets, ML Training Workflows, Vision-Language Models, Robotics Data Formats, DVC, Delta Lake

> Architect and scale high-throughput data infrastructure for model training, including ingestion, storage, and retrieval. Optimize distributed systems for reliability, latency, and cost efficiency while supporting research and production use cases.

## 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 Data Infrastructure MLEs to scale the systems that power our model training data pipeline, from raw ingestion and storage to indexing, retrieval, and throughput optimization at massive scale. We hire across levels — from senior to staff.

## What You'll Do

- Architect, build, and scale a high-throughput data infrastructure that processes and manages billions of video clips with strong guarantees around reliability, latency, and cost efficiency
- Design and optimize large-scale storage systems (cloud object storage, databases, metadata stores) for multimodal datasets
- Build efficient indexing and retrieval systems to support fast dataset querying, filtering, and iteration for research and production use cases
- Develop observability frameworks for data pipelines including monitoring, alerting, failure recovery, and performance optimization
- Implement intelligent workload balancing and throughput optimization across distributed compute and storage systems
- Manage data artifacts, versioning, and lineage to ensure reproducibility and traceability across training runs
- Build internal interfaces and lightweight tools that enable researchers and engineers to explore, query, and analyze large datasets at scale
- Support integration and scalable deployment of vision-language models (VLMs) within data pipelines for screening, enrichment, or metadata generation

## What We're Looking For

- 5+ years of experience in data infrastructure, distributed systems, ML infrastructure, or a closely related field
- Strong experience building and operating large-scale data pipelines (1B+ samples or petabyte-scale systems preferred)
- Deep understanding of distributed systems, databases, indexing strategies, and cloud storage architectures
- Experience optimizing data throughput, workload balancing, and cost-performance tradeoffs in cloud environments
- Experience with distributed compute frameworks such as Ray or Spark for large-scale data processing and transformation
- Strong skills in observability, monitoring, and production reliability for high-scale systems
- Strong software engineering fundamentals with the ability to own systems end-to-end, from design to production
- Staff-level candidates are expected to define technical direction and own architectural decisions independently; senior candidates execute complex systems work with strong fundamentals and growing scope

## Nice to Have (But Not Required)

- Experience managing large multimodal datasets
- Familiarity with ML training workflows and data lifecycle management
- Familiarity with vision-language models (VLMs) and experience running ML inference workloads at scale in distributed or cloud environments
- Experience with robotics data formats or real-world sensor data (video, proprioception, teleoperation logs)
- Experience with data warehouse technologies (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift) for large-scale data storage, querying, and analytics
- Familiarity with data versioning and lineage tooling (e.g., DVC, Delta Lake, or similar)

## Why This Role

- Own the data foundation that everything else runs on — model quality is only as good as the data infrastructure beneath it
- Direct collaboration with research and ML systems teams; your work has immediate, measurable impact on training velocity
- High ownership in a small team — you'll make real architectural decisions, not execute tickets
- Help build the infrastructure that powers robots operating in the real world, at scale

## 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