Forward Deployed Engineer, World Models

About the role

Odyssey is an AI lab developing general world models, and it is hiring Forward Deployed Engineers to bring its models into real-world environments. The role sits at the intersection of research, engineering, product and partners, working directly with customers to turn ambiguous needs into technical breakthroughs. It is not a traditional research engineering role: candidates modify models, design experiments, build conditioning and control methods, develop evaluation frameworks and shape the core research roadmap.

Key responsibilities

• Embed with strategic customers to understand their workflows, constraints, data and highest-value problems, especially in robotics, simulation, autonomy, training and interactive media.
• Translate customer goals into research and engineering problems, prototypes and deployment plans.
• Adapt and extend models through fine-tuning, post-training, conditioning, controllability, inference optimization and learned control policies.
• Build end-to-end prototypes connecting models to customer data, tools, simulators, hardware and production systems.
• Design evaluations of usefulness, controllability, consistency and reliability, and diagnose failures in deployed systems.
• Create fast feedback loops between deployments and core research teams, and build reusable infrastructure and playbooks.
• Communicate technical decisions and results to technical teams and senior customer stakeholders, and publish case studies while protecting confidentiality.
• Work on-site with customers when projects benefit from close collaboration; staff are expected in the office at least three times a week.

Required profile

• Experience in world models, generative video, multimodal learning, robotics, autonomous systems, reinforcement learning, computer vision or large-scale machine learning.
• A strong builder who can move from an ambiguous problem to a deployed system without a detailed specification, and who modifies models as well as builds systems around them.
• Fluent across research to production, able to tell a research problem from an integration problem.
• Effective with customers and partners, able to manage competing priorities and learn quickly in unfamiliar domains.
• Willing to spend meaningful time with customers, including travel or embedding with partner teams.