The posting
About Generalist
At Generalist, we are on a mission to build general intelligence for the physical world and make it useful to everyone. We believe the industries and homes of the future will depend on humans and machines working together in new ways. Robots can help us build more and get more done.
We build embodied foundation models, starting with a focus on dexterity. This requires advancing the frontiers of data, models, and hardware, to enable robots to intelligently interact with the physical world.
The company embraces both large-scale AI and robotics as core to its DNA. Our team of researchers, roboticists, and company builders come from OpenAI, Boston Dynamics, Google DeepMind, and other frontier labs—with a track record of shipping AI breakthroughs. Before Generalist, we pioneered large embodied multimodal models and vision-language-action models (PaLM-E, RT-2, Gemini Robotics), launched and scaled ChatGPT and GPT-4 to hundreds of millions of users, engineered the foundations of autonomous driving, built next-generation robots (Atlas, Spot, Stretch) and pushed the limits of what they can do (from parkour to manipulation, and testing robustness).
We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.
About the Role
Applied Scientists own the mastery of new frontier model capabilities. This includes developing post-training recipes for learning a wide range of dexterous tasks — from pushing the frontiers of science lab automation, to generalizing manufacturing and warehouse logistics, to designing open-ended evaluations that challenge what the models can do, and more. You are responsible for hill-climbing broad sets of manipulation capabilities until they are robust, general, and reusable across multiple applications. This role is a hybrid of research, engineering, and operations, and we expect excellence in all three areas.
This is an empirical, model science-first role. You will define what "good" looks like for a capability, build the evaluations that measure it, run experiments across model variants and data recipes, analyze the results, and drive the post-training loop. You will leverage post-training, data, task design, and rigorous experimentation, to compound model capabilities: anything mastered for one application can become a strength of the foundation model for entire industries.
You'll be responsible for:
- Owning end-to-end improvement of target capabilities, from baseline measurement to demonstrated mastery
- Designing task suites and evaluation protocols that faithfully capture what research, science partners, and customers need, and that generalize beyond any single deployment
- Coordinating data collection, training and fine-tuning models, sweeping data mixtures and configurations, and orchestrating large-scale evaluations
- Running rigorous experimental analysis across model variants — isolating variables, quantifying statistical confidence, and diagnosing failure modes from rollout data
You might thrive in this role if you:
- Are comfortable with data analysis at scale: slicing roll out logs, computing metrics, visualizing results, and investigating what happened and why
- Care deeply about evaluation, benchmarking, and failure analysis — and are continuously diligent in the face of seemingly repetitive, but subtly changing task evaluations
- Enjoy rapid iteration with real-world feedback loops, and are willing to get hands-on with robots and physical task setups when the experiment demands it
- Are motivated by making capabilities work for real applications
- Can communicate findings clearly to both research teams and partner-facing teams
- Have a strong background in machine learning and/or robot learning (e.g. a PhD in a relevant area)
