---
title: 'Research Scientist at Roboflow'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-roboflow-san-francisco-8cy36mh11z3t'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-12'
---

# Research Scientist at Roboflow

- **Company:** Roboflow
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-09-21
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/roboflow/3962be8a-60e3-4fc3-9bb6-3a84addb8e08

## Job description

## Who We Are

Roboflow is building the visual cortex for AGI.

Every day, millions of developers and half of the Fortune 100 use Roboflow to [count cells](https://blog.roboflow.com/cancer-research-computer-vision/) to accelerate cancer research, improve [construction site safety](https://blog.roboflow.com/preventing-accidents-on-construction-sites-with-computer-vision/), [digitize floor plans](https://blog.roboflow.com/floor-plan-analysis-computer-vision/), [preserve coral reef populations](https://blog.roboflow.com/reefos-supercharging-coral-reef-restoration-with-ai/), [guide drone flight](https://blog.roboflow.com/georeferencing-drone-videos/), and [much more](https://roboflow.com/templates).

We have built the tools, community, and resources needed to make the world programmable with artificial intelligence. We're supported by great customers and investors, having raised over $100 million from Google Ventures, Craft Ventures, Sam Altman, Lachy Groom, Y Combinator, and more.

Roboflow Labs is our applied research unit. We train our own open models (RF-DETR). We build our own benchmarks grounded in real enterprise use cases (RF100-VL). And we partner with frontier labs to deliver the training data they need to advance the capabilities that drive the most value back to our customers.

Behind all of it is a global network of millions of Roboflow developers who have annotated billions of images and videos to date, as well as a proven enterprise business that is exploding as AI traverses the physical economy.

## What You'll Do

As a Research Scientist at Roboflow Labs, you'll sit at the intersection of our benchmarks, our models, and the researchers at frontier labs who buy our data: running failure analyses that show exactly where a model breaks on real-world tasks, turning those findings into dataset and evaluation specifications, and validating that the data we ship actually moves the numbers. You'll publish, extend RF100-VL and the benchmarks that follow it, and help set the research agenda for a team whose work is grounded in millions of real deployments rather than fabricated test sets.

- Design datasets, evaluations, and RL environments that target measurable gaps in frontier vision-language, multi-modal, robotics, and coding models
- Run structured failure analyses on partner labs' models against Roboflow's real-world task distribution and write the remediation specs that say what data will close each gap
- Own the research behind new benchmarks that we publish.
- Validate data quality empirically — fine-tune, ablate, and measure so that every dataset we sell comes with evidence it works
- Contribute to Roboflow's open models (RF-DETR and successors) and represent Labs within the research community
- Work directly with research scientists at frontier labs as a technical peer, translating their model roadmaps into concrete data programs

## Who You Are

You are a researcher who wants to see your work turn into data that ships. You have high agency and a bias toward action.

- PhD or equivalent research experience in computer vision, multi-modal learning, machine learning, or a closely related field, with a track record of published work or shipped research
- Hands-on experience with post-training: fine-tuning, RL, evaluation design, or data curation for large models
- Strong engineering fundamentals — you write the code for your own experiments and can hand it to an engineer to productionize
- Clear written communication; you can explain a failure mode to a lab researcher and a data spec to an annotator
- Nice to have: experience at a frontier lab or as a data/evaluation partner to one; experience with vision-language models, robotics learning, or agentic coding evaluations

Where You'll Work Roboflow is a fully distributed company with hubs in San Francisco, New York City, Singapore, and Brazil. Roboflow Labs works in person in San Francisco. We host full company retreats twice per year.

## What You'll Receive

The target compensation for this role is $250,000 – $450,000 base salary commensurate with experience as well as equity in the company. Total cash comp is expected to scale significantly with growth of Roboflow Labs. In addition, we offer generous perks and benefits. Below are some of the highlights:

- Generous stipends covering travel, productivity, tools, meals, and office.
- Up to 100% of your health insurance costs covered.
- Unlimited PTO - with an annual 2 week minimum.
- 12 weeks parental leave

Not sure if this is you? We want a diverse, global team with a broad range of experience and perspectives. We carefully consider every application and will either move forward with you, find another team that might be a better fit, keep in touch for future opportunities, or thank you for your time.

Learn More About Us At Roboflow, we believe great ideas come from everywhere, and everyone. We’re proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. We consider all qualified applicants regardless of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, age, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristics.

## About Roboflow

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Roboflow provides an end-to-end platform for developers and enterprises to build, train, and deploy computer vision applications.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B – $40M raised Nov 2024)
- **Headquarters**: Distributed company with offices in New York City and San Francisco; headquartered in the Midwestern United States
- **Founded**: 2019
- **Founders**: Brad Dwyer, Joseph Nelson

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence, Developer Tools
- **Target customers**: Developers, machine learning engineers, enterprises (B2B); over half of the Fortune 100 use Roboflow
- **Mission statement**: "Make the physical world programmable." [roboflow.com/about](https://roboflow.com/about)

## Products & Services
- **[Roboflow Platform](https://roboflow.com/)**: End-to-end tooling for dataset management, model training, and deployment. Supports annotation, versioning, training with popular frameworks, and deployment to cloud or edge devices.
- **[Inference](https://roboflow.com/inference)**: Open source, production-ready inference server for running computer vision models. Deployable on cloud infrastructure or edge devices. Compliant with SOC2 Type 2 and HIPAA.
- **[Supervision](https://roboflow.com/supervision)**: Open source library offering utilities for annotation, object tracking, model chaining, and custom pipeline logic.
- **[Autodistill](https://roboflow.com/autodistill)**: Open source tool for using large foundation models to label data, enabling training of smaller, faster supervised models.
- **[Notebooks](https://roboflow.com/notebooks)**: Open source Jupyter Notebooks demonstrating training and inference with state-of-the-art computer vision models.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Funding**: $63M+ total raised (Series B of $40M announced Nov 2024) [roboflow.com/careers](https://roboflow.com/careers)
- **Key Metric**: Over 1 million developers and 16,000+ organizations use Roboflow; more than two-thirds of the Fortune 100 build with Roboflow
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Amjad Masad (CEO Replit), Guillermo Rauch (CEO Vercel), co-founders of OpenAI, Stripe, Firebase, Segment. Jeff Dean (Chief Scientist, Google DeepMind) is an advisor. [roboflow.com/about](https://roboflow.com/about) [crunchbase.com](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/roboflow)
- **Growth Signals**: Released RF-DETR (state-of-the-art real-time object detection model) in March 2025; expanded enterprise-grade infrastructure (SOC2, HIPAA); integrations with NVIDIA, Azure, CVAT; growing customer base across industries (sports, manufacturing, logistics).

## Competitive Advantages
- **End-to-end platform** covering the entire computer vision pipeline from data labeling to deployment.
- **Open source core tools** (Inference, Supervision, Autodistill) build a large developer community and ecosystem.
- **Enterprise-grade security and compliance** (SOC2 Type 2, HIPAA, encryption, A+ SSL rating) lowering barriers for regulated industries.
- **Strong integration ecosystem** with frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow), cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP), and hardware (NVIDIA).
- **Community scale** (1M+ developers) creates network effects and accelerates model improvement.

## Strategic Focus
- **Enterprise adoption**: Investing in enterprise tooling, compliance, and customer success (e.g., HIPAA BAAs, dedicated support).
- **Open source leadership**: Continuing to release and maintain popular open source projects (Inference, Supervision, Autodistill) to drive adoption and innovation.
- **Edge deployment**: Optimizing for running models on edge devices (cameras, drones, mobile) with minimal friction.
- **Foundation model integration**: Using large vision models to generate training data for smaller, efficient models (Autodistill) and releasing state-of-the-art models like RF-DETR.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Values include "full-stack people" (ownership beyond role), "together everywhere" (remote collaboration), and "curious, crafty, committed" (autonomy, problem-solving, teamwork). [roboflow.com/careers](https://roboflow.com/careers)
- **Work model**: Distributed-first with dedicated offices in NYC and SF; two company-wide onsites per year.
- **Benefits**: Competitive salary & equity, unlimited vacation, parental leave & fertility support, medical/vision/dental, mental health support, $4,000 annual travel stipend, $350/month productivity stipend, $350/month AI tool stipend, home office stipend, relocation stipend.
- **Impact**: Work spans industries like sports (Wimbledon), manufacturing (Rivian), and logistics (BNSF Railway).

## Sources
1. [roboflow.com](https://roboflow.com/)
2. [roboflow.com/about](https://roboflow.com/about)
3. [roboflow.com/careers](https://roboflow.com/careers)
4. [crunchbase.com](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/roboflow)
5. [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/roboflow)

## Other roles at Roboflow

- [Head of Partnerships](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-partnerships-roboflow-ny-sf-or-yn49qgdkbzbe) — NY Sf OR, United States
- [Head of Delivery](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-delivery-roboflow-ny-sf-or-fca5zctrdst7) — NY Sf OR, United States
- [Customer Success Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/customer-success-engineer-roboflow-ny-sf-or-v1wsgw463j3h) — NY Sf OR, United States
- [Sales Development Leader](https://feeny.ai/job/sales-development-leader-roboflow-new-york-f5grfbmv1veg) — New York, NY
- [Commercial Sales Leader](https://feeny.ai/job/commercial-sales-leader-roboflow-new-york-7x7ds4tshkba) — New York, NY
- [Business Development](https://feeny.ai/job/business-development-roboflow-san-francisco-j8swq2pe3bh4) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-roboflow-san-francisco-cw15g2gcvpf6) — San Francisco, CA
- [Growth Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-lead-roboflow-san-francisco-5kajx8d3afmj) — San Francisco, CA
- [Strategic Projects Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-projects-lead-roboflow-san-francisco-5vw2mgrgtvk2) — San Francisco, CA
- [Solutions Architect](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-architect-roboflow-ny-sf-3ymj8eh7jtrr) — NY Sf, OR