{"id":1620884,"url":"https://alion.io/job/atoms-staff-machine-learning-engineer-world-models-city","title":"Staff Machine Learning Engineer - World Models City","company":{"id":1533,"name":"Atoms","domain":"atoms.co","url":"https://alion.io/company/atoms","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":88,"open_postings":76,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.276,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":68,"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"staff","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":273000,"max":321000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":321000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"Computer Vision","optional":false},{"name":"Embodied AI","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Physical AI","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Self-Supervised Learning","optional":false},{"name":"World Models","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-24T18:31:48Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-24","last_verified_at":"2026-10-18T09:03:26Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":23,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":23},"description":"Who we are \nAtoms is building the machines that power the next era of progress.\nOver the last decade, software has transformed the digital world. But the physical world, where food is made, minerals are mined, goods are moved, and industries are run, remains far less intelligent, far less efficient, and far more constrained. We’re changing that.\nAtoms builds Physical AI- real-world robots for the industries that move civilization forward, starting with food, mining, and transport. Our systems are designed to understand, predict, and control the real world with precision, turning complex physical operations into something more reliable, more scalable, and more productive.\nThis work requires more than robotics. It requires deep integration across hardware, software, AI, operations, manufacturing, and real estate. We don’t just build machines in a lab. We deploy them into real environments, operate them, learn from them, and improve them until they work at scale.\nWe are roboticists, engineers, operators, and builders. We believe the next great technology companies will not only transform information, but the physical systems that shape everyday life.\nIf you want to work on hard problems with real-world impact, join us.\nAbout the role\nAs a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer focused on World Models, you will be one of the foundational technical leaders of Atoms' AI organization. You will help develop models that learn rich representations of the physical world from large scale multimodal data enabling machines to understand environments, model how those environments evolve, and provide the learned representations needed for downstream reasoning and action. This is an opportunity to help define a new generation of physical AI systems.\nRather than relying exclusively on traditional, independently engineered perception and autonomy components, we are exploring foundation model approaches capable of learning from diverse sensor inputs and large amounts of real world experience. You will work at the intersection of foundation models, multimodal learning, computer vision, robotics, and embodied AI to help determine what these systems should look like at Atoms.\nThis is a deeply technical individual contributor role with significant influence over our research direction and long term AI architecture.\nWhat you'll do\nDefine and help build Atoms' technical architecture for world models and foundation models for physical AI.\nDevelop large scale models that learn representations of complex, dynamic physical environments.\nBuild models capable of learning from multimodal inputs including video, images, spatial information, sensor data, robot state, and other realworld signals.\nExplore architectures that capture spatial, temporal, semantic, and physical relationships within realworld environments.\nDevelop approaches for learning how environments evolve over time and how actions influence future states.\nResearch and build self supervised, generative, predictive, and representation earning approaches for physical world intelligence.\nExplore the application of modern foundation model architectures to robotics and autonomous systems.\nDevelop training strategies that take advantage of largescale realworld and simulated datasets.\nMake architectural decisions spanning data, model design, pretraining, finetuning, evaluation, inference, and deployment.\nEstablish evaluation methodologies for measuring a model's ability to understand, represent, and predict the physical world.\nPartner closely with engineers and researchers working across perception, action models, robotics, autonomy, simulation, and ML infrastructure.\nTranslate emerging research into systems capable of operating on real machines in real environments.\nProvide technical leadership through research direction, architecture reviews, mentorship, experimentation, and handson engineering.\nHelp establish the technical bar for the growing AI Research organization and participate in identifying and assessing exceptional engineering and research talent.\nWhat we're looking for\nDeep expertise in machine learning with experience developing large-scale deep learning or foundation model systems.\nStrong understanding of modern model architectures and representation learning.\nExperience with one or more areas such as multimodal learning, video models, generative models, self-supervised learning, predictive models, spatial intelligence, or embodied AI.\nExperience training models on large-scale datasets and understanding the relationship between data, architecture, compute, and model performance.\nStrong understanding of the full ML lifecycle, including data strategy, model architecture, training, evaluation, optimization, and inference.\nExperience translating research ideas into functioning machine learning systems.\nStrong software engineering fundamentals and the ability to remain deeply handson in Python and modern ML frameworks.\nDemonstrated ability to operate in ambiguous research spaces where the architecture and solution may not yet be known.\nA track record of making consequential technical decisions and influencing research or engineering direction beyond an individual project.\nAbility to communicate complex research and technical ideas clearly and collaborate across research, engineering, and robotics disciplines.\nWhy join us\nAt Atoms, you’ll work on one of the defining challenges of our time-bringing automation into the physical world to drive real, lasting impact. We exist to uncover valuable unknown truths and turn them into progress, which means constantly pushing beyond what’s known and building what doesn’t yet exist. The work is ambitious and often challenging, but it’s grounded in a shared sense of purpose and a team committed to seeing it through together. Our work only matters if it serves others, and we know that meaningful progress depends on the trust of the people we serve and the strength of our team-so we invest in both, creating an environment where you can do your best work and grow.\nWhat else you need to know\nThis role is based in our San Francisco office. Atoms is a company driven by invention and continuous change - we are constantly reimagining our industries, building new products, and refining how we operate. We do our best work together. That’s why all of our office-based teams work onsite, five days a week.\nThe base salary range for this role is$273,000 - $321,000 per year.\nActual compensation will be determined on an individual basis and may vary depending on experience, skills, and qualifications.\nBase salary is just one part of your total rewards package. You may also be eligible for equity awards.\nBenefits Summary (USA Full-Time Exempt Employees):\nMedical, Dental, Vision, Disability, and Life Insurance\nFlexible Spending Account / Health Savings Account Options\n401(k)\nEquity\nSick Time, Unlimited Flexible Time Off, and Paid Holidays\nPaid Parental Leave \nPre-Tax Commuter Benefit Plan\nTeam lunch in our SoMa office every Tuesday and Thursday\nBenefits are subject to change at the company's discretion.\nAtoms accepts applications on an ongoing basis.\nReady to join us as we serve those who serve others? \n#LI-Onsite","description_format":"text","description_chars":7198,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Flexible time off","Life insurance","Parental leave"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Industrial Automation","Industrial Robotics","Mining & Heavy Industry Robotics"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-01T20:44:01Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":87,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.871,"p_room":1,"age_days":22,"expected_fill_days":68,"reasons":["conf:1","velocity","win:early","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":321000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/atoms-staff-machine-learning-engineer-world-models-city","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/atoms-staff-machine-learning-engineer-world-models-city.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-18T11:42:39Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":17398,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-19T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":1533},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=1533"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fatoms-staff-machine-learning-engineer-world-models-city"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fatoms-staff-machine-learning-engineer-world-models-city"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fatoms-staff-machine-learning-engineer-world-models-city"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/atoms-staff-machine-learning-engineer-world-models-city\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fatoms-staff-machine-learning-engineer-world-models-city"}]}