The posting
WHO WE ARE
Odyssey https://odyssey.ml is an AI lab pioneering general world models: causal, multimodal systems that learn to predict and interact with the world over long horizons. This foundational technology promises to revolutionize robotics, science, healthcare, education, gaming, defense, and beyond.
Odyssey’s founders previously pioneered the most complex application of physical AI: self-driving cars. They’ve now brought together a world-class research team from DeepMind, Tesla, Waymo, Meta, Apple, and Wayve, who have made significant contributions to language models (DeepMind Gemini), video models (DeepMind Veo), world models (Wayve GAIA), and autonomous systems (Tesla FSD).
Odyssey has raised significant venture capital from GV, Amazon, AMD, EQT, NVIDIA, Natural Capital, In-Q-Tel, Elad Gil, Jeff Dean, Guillermo Rauch, Garry Tan, Kyle Vogt, and researchers from OpenAI, DeepMind, MSL, Recursive, and Thinking Machines.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
We’re hiring Forward Deployed Engineers to bring Odyssey’s world models into high-impact, real-world environments.
This role sits at the intersection of research, engineering, product, and our partners. You’ll work directly with customers to understand problems that cannot be solved with conventional software, translate those problems into research questions, and build working systems around Odyssey’s models.
This is not a traditional research engineering role. You’ll be expected to modify models, design experiments, build new conditioning and control methods, develop evaluation frameworks, and turn ambiguous partner needs into technical breakthroughs. The strongest work will both solve an immediate application and influence Odyssey’s core research roadmap.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Embed closely with strategic customers to understand their workflows, technical constraints, data, and highest-value problems.
- Identify where world models can create a step-change in capability, particularly across robotics, simulation, autonomy, training, interactive media, and other physical or visual domains.
- Translate loosely defined customer goals into concrete research and engineering problems, technical hypotheses, prototypes, and deployment plans.
- Adapt and extend Odyssey’s models for specific applications through fine-tuning, post-training, conditioning, controllability, inference optimization, and learned control policies.
- Build end-to-end prototypes that connect world models to customer data, tools, simulators, hardware, and production systems.
- Design application-specific evaluations that measure whether a model is useful, controllable, consistent, and reliable under real operating conditions.
- Diagnose failures in deployed systems and determine whether the solution belongs in data, modeling, training, inference, evaluation, or product design.
- Create fast feedback loops between customer deployments and Odyssey’s core research teams, turning field observations into general research advances.
- Work shoulder-to-shoulder with researchers, engineers, product teams, and customer stakeholders from initial exploration through deployment.
- Develop reusable infrastructure, methods, and playbooks so that successful work with one partner can accelerate future deployments.
- Communicate technical decisions and experimental results clearly to both deeply technical teams and senior customer stakeholders.
- Publish or share case studies when appropriate while protecting customer confidentiality and operational requirements.
WHO YOU ARE
- Deeply technical, with experience in world models, generative video, multimodal learning, robotics, autonomous systems, reinforcement learning, computer vision, or large-scale machine learning.
- An unusually strong builder. You can move from an ambiguous problem to an experiment, prototype, and deployed system without waiting for a detailed specification.
- Comfortable modifying models as well as building the systems around them. You can work across training, post-training, inference, data pipelines, evaluation, and application code.
- Skilled at working from first principles. You can distinguish a genuine research problem from an integration problem and design the right intervention for each.
- Fluent across the research-to-production gap. You care why a model works, but also whether it works reliably on real data, at acceptable latency, within operational constraints.
- Effective with customers and external partners. You listen carefully, develop a precise understanding of their needs, and establish credibility through technical depth and execution.
- Able to manage competing priorities without losing sight of the underlying research opportunity or customer outcome.
- Energized by unfamiliar domains. You can quickly learn the relevant workflows, terminology, constraints, and failure modes.
- Comfortable operating in high-trust, high-autonomy environments where the path is unclear and iteration speed matters.
- Willing to spend meaningful time working directly with customers, including travel or periods embedded with partner teams when necessary.
- Excited to help define how general world models become useful across industries—not someday, but in working systems today.
WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE
- Customers use systems you helped build to do something that was previously impossible or impractical.
- Deployment failures become insights that improve Odyssey’s underlying models and research direction.
- One-off prototypes evolve into reusable capabilities, evaluation methods, and infrastructure.
- You earn the trust of both Odyssey’s core researchers and the technical teams deploying our models.
- Your work creates a tight, compounding loop between frontier research and real-world use.
Forward Deployed Engineers should also expect to work on-site with customers when the project benefits from close collaboration.
Our staff is expected to be in office at least three times a week. A lot of our progress comes from working through problems together, and we want you in the room for that.
