Research Engineer, Hedra
$175-275k
+ Equity
5 days a week in office
AI lab empowering creation with AI
Be an early applicant
AI lab empowering creation with AI
21-100 employees
Be an early applicant
$175-275k
+ Equity
5 days a week in office
21-100 employees
Company mission
To build foundation models into products that power the next generation of human storytelling.
Role
Who you are
- Experience with pre-training or post-training on large generative models (video, multimodal, or action-conditioned)
- Hands-on proficiency with PyTorch and distributed training frameworks (FSDP, DeepSpeed)
- Strong fundamentals in machine learning, optimization, and large-scale data processing
- Familiarity with VLMs, VLAs, or world models
- Background in robotics, embodied AI, or sim-to-real transfer is a plus
- Experience with video understanding or temporal reasoning is a plus
- BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a related field
- We encourage you to apply even if you don't fully meet all the listed requirements; we value potential and diverse perspectives, and your unique skills could be a great asset to our team
What the job involves
- Hedra is a pioneering generative modeling company — first models to market — now building a Physical AI team to bring these models to real-world industry and economy use cases
- As a Research Engineer on our Physical AI team, you will lead pre-training and post-training on action-conditioned world models, working hand-in-hand with industrial partners to close the loop between generative AI and physical systems
- This is not a black-box applied role: your work will be published, your infrastructure will be serious, and your impact will be direct
- If you want to work at the frontier of generative modeling and physical AI, this is the team
- Design, implement, and run pre-training and post-training pipelines for action-conditioned world models and vision-language-action (VLA) models
- Develop and refine training methodologies, including fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and large-scale multimodal learning
- Design and generate training and evaluation datasets from simulation, including environment setup, domain randomization, and sim-to-real transfer strategies
- Build distributed training infrastructure using PyTorch, FSDP, and DeepSpeed
- Work with multimodal data pipelines involving video, sensory inputs, and action sequences
- Evaluate model performance using both benchmark datasets and real-world deployment metrics
- Contributions research publications a plus
- Collaborate with industrial partners to adapt generative models for real-world physical AI applications
Our take
The relationship between machine learning and online content has grown closer in recent years, and Hedra is a video content platform that is pushing this symbiosis into new territory. Working as a content engine, Hedra's online creation studio helps users generate dialogue, audio and video from words.
As a digital presence automation tool, Hedra is moving beyond the likes of DallE and generative AI video content into more nuanced territory. For example, its product known as Character is a video foundation model for longer-form video generation focusing on customizable AI-generated video characters.
Between the version one release of Character in June 2024 and the company's fundraise that same August, more than 1.6 million videos had already been generated via the platform. This demonstrates the demand that exists for Hedra's offering. A new fundraise in 2025, which reportedly takes the company’s valuation to $200 million, will support the advancement of the quality and controllability of its models.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (2 rounds)
May 2025
$32m
SERIES A
Aug 2024
$10m
SEED
Total funding: $42m
Company benefits
- Equity
- 401k (no match)
- Healthcare (Silver PPO Medical, Vision, Dental)
- Gym access (at our office)
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Michael Lingelbach
(Founder & CEO)Previously Regina Casper Graduate Research Fellow at Stanford University, was an Intern at NVIDIA, Postbaccaulaureate researcher at Salk Institute for Biological Studies and a Scholar at the Janelia Research Campus.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 3 more jobs at Hedra