AI Research Scientist Leader

World Model Research Leader

San Francisco

Want to join a stealth start up who's building something new within world models?

Our client is looking for a hands-on research leader to help define and execute the technical direction for real-time video world models. This role sits at the intersection of video generation, world models, and large-scale model training. You’ll work closely with the founder to guide research while remaining deeply involved in building and training models. (Paying up to $500K base and up to 5% equity in the company)

What you’ll work on

• Leading research and development of real-time video world models
• Designing and training video foundation models across pre-training and continued training stages
• Exploring model architectures for temporal generation (e.g., diffusion, flow-based, or autoregressive approaches)
• Building scalable video data pipelines, distributed training systems, and evaluation frameworks
• Improving latency, inference efficiency, and streaming generation for real-time video generation
• Helping recruit and mentor a small, high-performing research team

What we’re looking for

• PhD with strong publications in video generation, world models, multimodal models, or temporal modeling
• Experience working on large-scale model training pipelines and distributed training systems
• Deep knowledge of generative architectures such as diffusion, flow models, or autoregressive transformers
• Strong understanding of data pipelines, distributed GPU training, and model evaluation
• Comfortable leading research while remaining highly hands-on technically

You’ll be joining a small, highly technical team focused on advancing how video models are trained and deployed for real-time video generation.

Our client is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes applicants from all backgrounds. All qualified candidates will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.