Research Scientist

Description:

Waabi, an innovative AI company founded by visionary Raquel Urtasun, is building the next generation of self-driving technology. The company’s groundbreaking autonomous-driving stack is powered by Waabi World, a simulation platform designed to provide realistic, scalable, and controllable environments for safe autonomous driving development. With offices in Toronto, San Francisco, Dallas, and Pittsburgh, Waabi is growing rapidly and is backed by world-class investors.

As a Research Scientist, World Models, you will contribute to the development of cutting-edge algorithms that model complex and dynamic 4D environments with minimal supervision. Your research will directly strengthen Waabi World’s capacity to understand and simulate real-world traffic interactions, generate safety-critical scenarios at scale, and advance autonomous driving technologies closer to commercialization.

Key Responsibilities:

• Conduct fundamental and applied research in generative and predictive world-modeling using techniques such as latent diffusion, NeRF, 3D Gaussian Splatting, and video generation models on multi-modal driving scene data.

• Collaborate with simulation engineers to integrate models into large-scale, distributed training and rendering pipelines.

• Publish impactful research at leading AI and robotics conferences (CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICRA, SIGGRAPH).

• Mentor junior researchers and interns, cultivating a culture of scientific rigor and rapid innovation.

• Stay at the forefront of advancements in generative AI, differentiable rendering, robotics, and knowledge distillation.

Qualifications:

• Ph.D. in Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a related technical field, or equivalent high-level research experience.

• Expert programming skills in Python and PyTorch (or JAX), with strong software engineering fundamentals and experience in distributed training.

• Demonstrated experience developing scalable generative or predictive models of the physical world.

• Strong collaboration and communication skills, with proven ability to work within cross-functional teams.

Preferred/Bonus Qualifications:

• Experience translating cutting-edge research into production-level systems with measurable impact.

• Strong record of first-author publications in top-tier venues related to world models, generative simulation, video prediction, diffusion models, NeRF/3DGS, or foundation models for autonomy.

Compensation & Benefits:

• Competitive salary ($155000 – $269000 annually) plus performance bonuses and equity awards.

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance.

• Flexible work arrangements with hybrid and remote support.

• Unlimited vacation and flexible hours.

• Daily meals, snacks, and beverages when working onsite.

• Team-building activities and social events, both virtual and in-person.

• A diverse, inclusive, and supportive workplace committed to equal opportunity.