{"id":3096436,"url":"https://alion.io/job/sereact-chief-science-officer","title":"Chief Science Officer","company":{"id":51885,"name":"Sereact","domain":"sereact.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/sereact","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":85,"open_postings":13,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.615,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":57,"computed_at":"2026-10-29T05:49:05Z"}},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"head","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Stuttgart, Germany","Zurich, Switzerland","Boston, United States"],"countries":["DE","CH","US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":124000,"max_usd":284000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":16},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"arXiv","optional":false},{"name":"Embodied AI","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Synthetic Data","optional":false},{"name":"Teleoperation","optional":false},{"name":"Vision-Language-Action","optional":false},{"name":"World Models","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-22T15:40:44Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-22","last_verified_at":"2026-10-29T13:12:25Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":6,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":6},"description":"Chief Science Officer @ Sereact\nChief Science Officer (m/f/d) · Zurich or Stuttgart, Boston possible · Reports to the CEO · Full-time\nWho we are\nSereact builds the robot brain for physical work. Cortex, our vision-language-action foundation model, is hardware-agnostic: the same model runs single-arm and dual-arm systems, mobile manipulators and humanoids that pick, sort and handle returns in live production across Europe and the US. Customers include Zalando, IKEA, BMW, Rohlik and DHL.\nFounded in 2021 in Stuttgart, with an R&D hub in Zurich and a US office in Boston. We have raised more than $145 million, most recently a $116 million Series B led by Headline, with Zalando as a strategic investor. We work in small, senior teams with a flat structure; execution counts more than titles.\nWhy this role, why now\nOur robots produce data no lab can stage. Our fleet has recorded more than 500 million manipulation interactions in live warehouse operations; Cortex 2.0 was trained on a curated 10 million of them and added a world model that plans before it acts (arXiv 2604.20246). Cortex 2.5 learns a new task from a few demonstrations instead of a training run. Deployments are growing from single robots to fleets, and the research team is growing with them.\nWe now want one scientific leader who owns the research behind Cortex end to end and turns what our fleet experiences every day into the next step change in what robots can do.\nThe Real-World Learning Loop is your system\nSereact is a frontier research lab and a production-grade robotics company in one. Our bet: general-purpose robotic intelligence “must be learned from live deployments” (The Real-World Learning Loop, Feb 2026). Every stage of that loop is yours to raise:\nIn-Situ Policy Execution. Every robot in production runs the current policy, and every shift is an experiment. You decide what the policies expose for learning.\n\nContinuous Data Acquisition. Robots annotate their own interactions while they work. You decide what is worth recording and which situations the fleet should go and find.\n\nData Curation and Learning. Novelty, uncertainty, failures and distribution shift decide what we learn from. You own the curation and the training recipe.\n\nEvaluation and Policy Redeployment. Updated policies pass validation gates before they return to the fleet. You set the bar, and how fast we can clear it safely.\n\nEvery deployment teaches the next one. Your job is to make that loop turn faster and teach more each time.\nResponsibilities\nSet the research agenda for Cortex: vision-language-action models, world models and planning, learning from interaction on real robots, and generalization across tasks and embodiments.\n\nMake the big bets: which directions get people and compute, and which ones we stop.\n\nOwn the data strategy: the mix of deployment, teleoperation, open-source and synthetic data, and what the fleet collects next.\n\nOwn the compute strategy, from large-scale training to real-time inference on the robot.\n\nBuild the evaluation science: benchmarks that predict performance in a customer’s operation, not only on a leaderboard.\n\nBuild and lead the research organisation in Zurich and Stuttgart: structure, leads, rhythm.\n\nSet the hiring bar and make Sereact the place the best people in robot learning want to join.\n\nTake research into production with engineering, so results reach the fleet in weeks and hold up in 24/7 operation.\n\nDecide with the founders what we publish, open-source or patent, and build our standing at CoRL, RSS, ICRA, NeurIPS and ICML.\n\nBe Sereact’s scientific voice with customers, partners, universities and investors, and build academic partnerships.\n\nPartner with the CTO, product and operations, so research, engineering and deployment pull in one direction.\n\nNot in scope, by design\nSoftware platform, hardware and field deployment engineering. They stay with the CTO and operations: the CTO owns how we build and ship, you own what we learn next.\n\nA research lab beside the business. Research at Sereact ends on a robot, ideally at a customer.\n\nProduct roadmap and pricing.\n\nWhat makes this role hard\nResearch and production compete for the same robots, people and compute. You make that trade-off every week, in the open.\n\nCortex is not a blank page. It already runs in customer operations, and our founders are deeply technical. You raise the ceiling of a running system.\n\nA result counts when it holds up in a customer’s operation, not when the paper is accepted.\n\nYour first 12 months\nFirst 90 days: know the fleet, the data and the team; agree the research roadmap with the founders; one evaluation standard everyone uses.\n\nBy month 6: a research organisation with clear ownership and a release rhythm from experiment to fleet.\n\nBy month 12: a new generation of Cortex in customer operations with measurable gains, key senior hires made, and work that puts Sereact on the map of robot learning.\n\nWhat you bring\nYou have led research in robot learning or embodied AI (VLA models, imitation or reinforcement learning, world models) and built a team around it.\n\nYour work runs on real robots, ideally outside the lab and for long stretches. You know what breaks first.\n\nScientific standing: a strong record at the top venues and a network that great researchers want to join.\n\nYou have made real calls on research bets, data and compute, and stopped what did not work.\n\nYou explain science to engineers, customers and investors alike, and you enjoy it.\n\nPhD in machine learning, robotics or a related field, or an equivalent track record.\n\nNice to have: large-scale pretraining of foundation models · fleet learning or data engines · industrial manipulation · experience in both academia and industry.\nThree questions we will ask you\nTell us about a model you took from a paper to a robot that ran for weeks without you. What broke first?\n\nIf you had our deployment data tomorrow, which bet would you make first, and what would you stop?\n\nHow do you decide what to publish and what to keep?\n\nWhat we offer\nRobots in live production that learn every day, and the data that comes with them.\n\nA seat in the leadership team of a company scaling from Europe into the US, with meaningful equity.\n\nLarge-scale compute and the freedom to build the research organisation you would want to work in.\n\nTeams in Stuttgart, Zurich and Boston; relocation support.\n\nHow we hire\nConversations with both founders, a research deep dive with the team, and a working session on a real problem from our deployments. We move fast.","description_format":"text","description_chars":6539,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"phd","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"},{"name":"Germany","iso":"DE","kind":"country"},{"name":"Switzerland","iso":"CH","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":true,"industries":["Robotics AI","Logistics & Warehouse Robotics","Robotic Software & Control Systems"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-22T16:20:11Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":63,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.632,"p_room":1,"age_days":6,"expected_fill_days":57,"reasons":["conf:1","stale_co","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-29T05:49:05Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/sereact-chief-science-officer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/sereact-chief-science-officer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-29T14:18:46Z","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":21515,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-30T00:00:00Z"}},"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":51885},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=51885"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fsereact-chief-science-officer"},{"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%2Fsereact-chief-science-officer"},{"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%2Fsereact-chief-science-officer"},{"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/sereact-chief-science-officer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fsereact-chief-science-officer"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3096436}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"sereact.ai","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3096436},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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