# Member of Technical Staff, Vision / Language

**Company:** [Xdof](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/xdof)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** ML Engineering
**Experience:** 3+ years
**Skills:** PyTorch, Vision-Language Models, Video Understanding, Robot Learning, Generative Modeling, Distributed Training, Mixed Precision Training, Vlas, Video Prediction, World Models
**Posted:** 2026-06-05

> Research Engineer/Scientist building vision-language pipelines and data systems for robot learning. Focus on turning egocentric/teleoperation video into high-signal training data for VLAs and world models.

## Job Description

## What You'll Do
- Design and implement vision-language pipelines for egocentric and teleoperation video: structured captioning, temporal grounding, action-conditioned scene understanding, and semantic annotation at scale
- Develop and evaluate representations that bridge visual perception, language, and low-level robot action — spanning VLAs, video prediction, and world models
- Build and improve data curation systems that assess quality, diversity, and coverage of large-scale robot demonstration datasets
- Work hands-on with bimanual and high-DoF manipulation data, including real teleoperation footage and sim-generated rollouts
- Collaborate directly with partner labs to define data requirements and close the loop between data quality and downstream policy performance
- Stay current on the research frontier (VLAs, video foundation models, flow matching, DiT architectures, egocentric pretraining) and translate insights into production systems

## Requirements
- MS or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Machine Learning, or a related field from a top-tier program
- 3–7 years of research or applied research experience (industry or academic) in one or more of: vision-language models, video understanding, robot learning, or generative modeling
- Deep fluency in PyTorch; working knowledge of large-scale training infrastructure (distributed training, mixed precision, large batch workflows)
- Published work or demonstrable impact in VLMs/VLAs, video representation learning, imitation learning, or a closely related area
- Strong engineering fundamentals — you can design clean systems, not just run experiments

## Benefits
- Competitive compensation and equity
- Comprehensive health and wellness benefits
- Flexible work arrangements
- Collaborative and fast-paced work environment
- Opportunity to shape the future of robotics and AI alongside an ambitious, values-driven team

## Similar roles

- [Member of Technical Staff](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/dd7c8bc4-741a-45d5-91a8-e6b1c4ad67e0) - xAI - Palo Alto, CA - $180k – $440k/yr
- [Staff Software Engineer, AI & App Experience](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/78128221-8199-41cd-9c63-502d3f61d603) - Chime - New York, NY - $223k – $308k/yr
- [Staff + Senior Software Engineer, Cloud Inference Launch Engineering](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/18b08a6a-5359-4836-b72e-c641fa718b04) - Anthropic - San Francisco, CA - $320k – $485k/yr
- [Senior Staff Software Engineer, Legal Automation](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/7870d3e1-ebec-4f7b-9ae5-c62926a06d6e) - Coinbase - Remote - $254k – $299k/yr
- [Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Computer Vision](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/2969c5c0-8479-43bb-b9b6-f8df93b528d7) - Pinterest - San Francisco, CA - $189k – $390k/yr

**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/dea33c6d-554b-49f1-b539-a1192c29513d
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/dea33c6d-554b-49f1-b539-a1192c29513d