Chief Science Officer

Why this role, why now

Our robots produce data no lab can stage. Our fleet has recorded more than 500 million manipulation interactions in live warehouse operations; Cortex 2.0 was trained on a curated 10 million of them and added a world model that plans before it acts (arXiv 2604.20246). Cortex 2.5 learns a new task from a few demonstrations instead of a training run. Deployments are growing from single robots to fleets, and the research team is growing with them.

We now want one scientific leader who owns the research behind Cortex end to end and turns what our fleet experiences every day into the next step change in what robots can do.

Responsibilities

• Set the research agenda for Cortex: vision-language-action models, world models and planning, learning from interaction on real robots, and generalization across tasks and embodiments.

• Make the big bets: which directions get people and compute, and which ones we stop.

• Own the data strategy: the mix of deployment, teleoperation, open-source and synthetic data, and what the fleet collects next.

• Own the compute strategy, from large-scale training to real-time inference on the robot.

• Build the evaluation science: benchmarks that predict performance in a customer’s operation, not only on a leaderboard.

• Build and lead the research organisation in Zurich and Stuttgart: structure, leads, rhythm.

• Set the hiring bar and make Sereact the place the best people in robot learning want to join.

• Take research into production with engineering, so results reach the fleet in weeks and hold up in 24/7 operation.

• Decide with the founders what we publish, open-source or patent, and build our standing at CoRL, RSS, ICRA, NeurIPS and ICML.

• Be Sereact’s scientific voice with customers, partners, universities and investors, and build academic partnerships.

• Partner with the CTO, product and operations, so research, engineering and deployment pull in one direction.
  

What makes this role hard

• Research and production compete for the same robots, people and compute. You make that trade-off every week, in the open.

• Cortex is not a blank page. It already runs in customer operations, and our founders are deeply technical. You raise the ceiling of a running system.

• A result counts when it holds up in a customer’s operation, not when the paper is accepted.
  

What you bring

• You have led research in robot learning or embodied AI (VLA models, imitation or reinforcement learning, world models) and built a team around it.

• Your work runs on real robots, ideally outside the lab and for long stretches. You know what breaks first.

• Scientific standing: a strong record at the top venues and a network that great researchers want to join.

• You have made real calls on research bets, data and compute, and stopped what did not work.

• You explain science to engineers, customers and investors alike, and you enjoy it.

• PhD in machine learning, robotics or a related field, or an equivalent track record.

Nice to have: large-scale pretraining of foundation models · fleet learning or data engines · industrial manipulation · experience in both academia and industry.

What we offer

• Robots in live production that learn every day, and the data that comes with them.

• A seat in the leadership team of a company scaling from Europe into the US, with meaningful equity.

• Large-scale compute and the freedom to build the research organisation you would want to work in.

• Teams in Stuttgart, Zurich and Boston; relocation support.