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Luma AILuma AI

Research Scientist - World Model

As a Research Scientist on the World Models team, you will invent next-generation world model architectures with a focus on controllability and physical consistency, develop controllability mechanisms, and define and own metrics for physical fidelity and action-following.

About the job

THE ROLE

This is the role at the center of the thesis. Luma already trains the strongest generative video models in the industry; the next step is turning those models into world models — interactive, controllable, physically faithful, and useful as a substrate for embodied reasoning. As a Research Scientist on the World Models team, you'll work on the next generation of generative models that can be rolled out as worlds.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

  • Invent next-generation world model architectures — diffusion, transformer, autoregressive, or hybrid — with a particular focus on controllability and physical consistency.
  • Develop controllability mechanisms that let an agent step into the world: action conditioning, view conditioning, long-horizon rollouts.
  • Define and own the metrics: physical fidelity, long-horizon coherence, action-following, and downstream usefulness for policy training.
  • Run scaling studies that tell us where compute, data, and architecture pay off.
  • Publish at the frontier; contribute to the open-source release that is the long-term deliverable.

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

  • PhD or equivalent research record in ML, computer vision, robotics, or related fields.
  • Deep expertise in at least one of: large-scale generative modeling (video/3D/world), self-supervised representation learning, model-based RL.
  • Strong PyTorch and large-scale training experience — you've trained models that hit the limits of a multi-node cluster.
  • A research record the field knows (top-venue publications and/or widely-used open releases).

PREFERRED

  • Prior work on world models, model-based RL, generative video, neural simulation, or 4D scene representations.
  • Experience using generative models for downstream embodied tasks (planning, control, evaluation).
  • Excitement about open-sourcing frontier models.

Compensation

The base pay range for this role is $250,000 – $450,000 per year.

Skills

PyTorch, Generative Modeling, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Robotics, Self-Supervised Learning, Model-Based Reinforcement Learning, Neural Simulation, 4D Scene Representations

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