Staff AI Researcher

About the Role

We are building next-generation video generation models that enable robots to learn, plan, and act through imagined futures.

As a Staff AI Researcher you will help set the technical direction for one of TBC’s core research and product areas. You will make high-leverage architectural decisions, anticipate modeling and scaling risks, and partner closely with the founders and product team to translate research into deployable systems. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone who can solve foundational research problems while raising the output of the broader team.

You will work closely with TBC’s founders, AI researchers, computational neuroscientists, biologists, engineers and product leaders. You will also help translate computational principles discovered through experiments on living neural networks into new video-model architectures, learning approaches and software systems.

What You’ll Work on

• Set the technical direction for TBC’s generative video modeling platform, including core modeling, training, evaluation, and deployment decisions
• Design video generation models that support expressive latent representations, stable rollouts, and control-oriented prediction
• Improve long-horizon rollout fidelity under autoregressive use, not just one-step accuracy
• Integrate video priors, physical structure, or object-centric representations into control systems
• Anticipate architectural and scaling bottlenecks before they constrain research or deployment
• Establish technical standards, guide key research decisions, and multiply team output through mentorship and collaboration

What We’re Looking for

• Strong background in machine learning, computer vision, robotics, or a related field
• Deep experience with one or more of the following:
• Generative models, including diffusion, autoregressive video, or sequence models
• Model-based reinforcement learning or planning
• System identification, physics-informed learning, or simulation
• Strong technical judgment and a track record of making consequential architectural or research decisions
• Ability to reason clearly about failure modes in long-horizon prediction and control
• Experience taking ambiguous research problems from first principles through implementation and evaluation
• Comfortable working across the stack, including modeling, training systems, evaluation, and deployment
• Ability to partner closely with founders, product leaders, and researchers to define priorities and convert research into product capability
• Evidence of improving the effectiveness and technical output of the people around you
• Deep expertise in computer vision and generative modeling
• Hands-on experience with diffusion models, autoregressive video models, or related generative architectures
• Experience designing and scaling novel research systems rather than only applying established approaches

What Success Looks Like

• TBC has a clear and scalable technical direction for its video generation-modeling platform
• Video generation models remain coherent and useful under their own long-horizon rollouts
• Policies learn faster or generalize better by training inside learned simulators
• Key architectural and scaling risks are identified and addressed early
• Research decisions translate into measurable product and platform progress
• The broader team moves faster and makes stronger technical decisions because of your leadership
• The team develops a clear understanding of when generative video models help-and when they do not

Preferred Qualifications

• PhD or MS in Computer Science, Robotics, Machine Learning, or a related field
• Research or industry experience in video generation models, embodied AI, generative video, robot learning, or learned simulation
• Experience training policies inside learned simulators or over imagined trajectories
• Experience with action-conditioned video prediction or controllable generative models
• Experience connecting learned models to real robotic systems
• Familiarity with latent-action models, cross-embodiment learning, or learning from human video
• Experience with object-centric representations, physical priors, or structured dynamics models
• Experience with digital twins, sim-to-real transfer, online adaptation, or closed-loop data collection
• Experience scaling research systems across large datasets or distributed training environments
• Publications at leading machine-learning, computer-vision, or robotics venues