{"id":722644,"url":"https://alion.io/job/mecka-research-scientist-computer-vision-hand-tracking-manipulation","title":"Research Scientist – Hand Tracking & Manipulation","company":{"id":678757,"name":"Mecka","domain":"mecka.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/mecka","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":93,"open_postings":7,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.286,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":33,"computed_at":"2026-11-11T05:49:22Z"}},"role":"Robotics","role_family":"Robotics","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["New York, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":139000,"max_usd":335000,"period":"year","method":"role_country_seniority_unknown","sample_n":590},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agile","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Computer Vision","optional":false},{"name":"CUDA","optional":false},{"name":"Embodied AI","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"Inverse Kinematics","optional":false},{"name":"Localization","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-06-15T03:54:06Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-29","last_verified_at":"2026-11-11T10:37:20Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":149,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":149},"description":"About Mecka AI\nMecka AI is building the data infrastructure layer for robotics and embodied AI.\nWe design and operate global systems for data capture, data labeling, and hardware-enabled workflows used by leading AI labs and robotics companies to train and validate humanoid and embodied AI systems.\nWe work closely with frontier robotics teams to bridge real-world data, simulation, learning-based systems, and deployed hardware.\nThe Role\nWhile our existing perception division handles state estimation and spatial mapping, this role is dedicated to one of the most critical bottlenecks in embodied AI: dexterous manipulation and human-object interaction. We are hiring a Research Scientist to architect and train proprietary foundation models from scratch focused on 3D hand tracking and articulated pose estimation.\nYour core mandate is twofold: building our in-house equivalents to cutting-edge 3D hand and mesh recovery architectures, and developing highly robust interaction models tailored for the heavily occluded, chaotic domain of egocentric manipulation. Beyond these core pillars, you will serve as a lead problem-solver for emergent perception challenges as our hardware and downstream robotics needs evolve.\nTo achieve this, we can provide a massive, continuous stream of high-quality, proprietary ground-truth manipulation data captured by our infrastructure. You will use this data advantage to train networks that surpass current public baselines, owning the complete hand-object perception loop for our data engine.\nWhat You'll Work On\nArchitecting Proprietary Articulation Models\nZero-to-One Model Development: Design, implement, and train state-of-the-art networks for 3D hand pose estimation, dense mesh recovery, and kinematic tracking.\n\nLarge-Scale Distributed Training: Scale multi-view and temporal ML architectures across multi-GPU clusters to handle massive, multi-modal datasets of human hands in action.\n\nLoss & Architecture Innovation: Push the boundaries of current paradigms by developing novel loss functions that enforce biomechanical constraints, temporal smoothness, and physical plausibility.\n\nEgocentric Hand-Object Interaction (HOI)\nEgocentric Manipulation Modeling: Build and train custom architectures capable of handling the extreme motion blur, severe self-occlusion, and rapid rotations inherent in first-person object manipulation.\n\nDynamic Scene Understanding: Use your models to track objects through complex grasps, segment tools from hands, and map contact points and forces to provide rich regularization for downstream action-conditioned robotics models.\n\nEmergent Perception R&D\nRapid Prototyping: Tackle novel, unmapped AI challenges as they arise. You will rapidly prototype and deploy new models for tasks spanning tactile-visual fusion, fine-grained action segmentation, and novel hardware sensor integrations.\n\nAgile Problem Solving: Pivot to resolve sudden algorithmic bottlenecks in the data engine, adapting the latest research to unblock new product capabilities for our robotics customers.\n\nDense Contact & Physics-Aware Tracking\nInteraction Integration: Connect the outputs of your foundational tracking models into highly optimized pipelines that reason about physical contact surfaces and object affordances, directly bridging the gap between human video data and robotic control policies.\n\nWho You Are\nRequired Background\nDeep expertise in Deep Learning, 3D Computer Vision, and specifically Articulated Tracking / Hand Pose Estimation.\n\nProven experience training large-scale vision models from scratch, not just running inference or fine-tuning existing checkpoints.\n\nStrong theoretical and practical understanding of parametric hand models, inverse kinematics, and dense mesh estimation.\n\nMastery of PyTorch and deep learning scaling frameworks.\n\nExperience handling and curating massive, multi-terabyte image and video datasets for training.\n\nComfortable operating in a fast-paced environment where priorities can shift rapidly to capitalize on new research or hardware capabilities.\n\nStrong Signals:\nFirst-author publications in top-tier venues (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS) focusing on 3D hand tracking, hand-object interaction (HOI), dexterous manipulation, or human mesh recovery.\n\nSpecific experience working with massive egocentric manipulation datasets (e.g., Ego4D, Ego-Exo4D, DexYCB, Epic-Kitchens) and solving the unique optimization challenges they present.\n\nExperience writing custom CUDA kernels to accelerate 3D operations, differentiable rendering of meshes, or collision/contact computation.\n\nWhy This Role?\nThe Data Advantage: You will have access to a scale and quality of proprietary spatial and temporal ground truth for human manipulation that most academic researchers only dream of.\n\nPure R&D & Model Ownership: You are not maintaining legacy systems; you are given a blank slate and the compute resources to build the state-of-the-art.\n\nHigh Impact: The kinematic priors and interaction models you architect will directly define how the next generation of embodied AI agents learn to physically grasp and manipulate the world.\n\nWarning: Research Scientist positions require hyper-specific expertise. Please limit your applications to one research role. Applying to multiple Research Scientist positions suggests a lack of focus and may result in the rejection of all submissions. You may, however, apply to other non-research roles alongside your research application.\nA Note on Applying\nStudies show women and candidates from underrepresented groups often only apply when they meet 100% of the listed qualifications, while others apply after meeting 60%. If you don't check every box above but believe you can do the job, we encourage you to apply - we're looking for capability and trajectory, not a perfect checklist match.\nInclusive Hiring at Mecka\nWe are committed to creating an inclusive and supportive candidate experience. Should you require any accommodation whatsoever during the interview process, please inform us without any hesitation. Mecka is dedicated to ensuring equal treatment and opportunity in all phases of recruitment, selection, and employment, in compliance with employment law. We do not discriminate based on gender, race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, gender identity/expression, sexual orientation, veteran or military status, or any other protected category. Mecka is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, fostering a culture of inclusivity and maintaining a work environment that is free from discrimination, harassment, and retaliation.\nUse of Artificial Intelligence in Recruitment\nMecka uses artificial intelligence (AI) responsibly to support administrative and efficiency-focused aspects of our recruitment process. This includes activities such as drafting job descriptions, generating interview questions, note-taking and recordings, and supporting sourcing and scheduling workflows. All candidate evaluations, interviews, and hiring decisions are made by members of the Mecka team. While AI tools may assist with screening and assessment, they do not replace human judgment in selection decisions. Our use of AI is intended to streamline routine tasks, improve consistency, and enhance the overall candidate experience. We are committed to upholding principles of fairness, transparency, and accountability in all hiring activities. 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