Research Scientist, World Models

Waabi’s autonomous-driving stack is powered by Waabi World, which aims to deliver realistic, scalable, controllable, and efficient simulation. As a Research Scientist in World Models, you will develop algorithms and productionize the next generation of World Models that can reason about complex, dynamic 4D environments.

This role focuses on large-scale world models for temporal reasoning and generation, including video models, multimodal generative models, LLM/VLM/VLA models, and predictive models of traffic participants and scenes. Your work will directly power Waabi World’s ability to model future evolution, synthesize realistic safety-critical scenarios, and provide rich generative priors for downstream planning, testing, and training.

You will…

• Conduct fundamental and applied research in generative and predictive world-modeling
  • Video generation and prediction.
  • Latent diffusion / autoregressive / flow-matching models.
  • Multimodal foundation models for driving scenes.
  • LLM / VLM / VLA methods for scene understanding, reasoning, and control.
  • Generative scenario modeling and controllable simulation.
  • Model distillation.

• Collaborate with engineers to integrate models into large-scale, distributed training and rendering pipelines.
• Publish high-impact research at top conferences (CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICRA, SIGGRAPH).
• Mentor junior scientists and interns; foster a culture of scientific rigor and rapid experimentation.
• Stay on top of emerging advances in generative AI, differentiable rendering, knowledge distillation/compression, and robotics.

Qualifications:

• Demonstrated technical innovation: You have a Ph.D. in Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a related field or equivalent research experience pushing the boundaries of a technical field..
• Strong prototyping and implementation: You have expert-level Python & PyTorch (or JAX) skills; strong software-engineering fundamentals and experience with distributed training.
• Expert domain knowledge: You have built generative or predictive models of the physical world with scale and efficiency in mind for real-world applications
• Team player: You have worked in a close-knit team of researchers and engineers and have strong communication to deliver successful projects.

Bonus:

• Proven ability to translate research into production-quality code and measurable product impact.
• Demonstrated publications (first-author) in top-tier venues on topics such as world models, generative simulation, video prediction, diffusion, flow-matching, or foundation models for autonomy.