Chief Science Officer
Job description
Chief Science Officer at Sereact owning the research agenda behind Cortex, the company's vision-language-action foundation model, and leading the research organisation across Zurich and Stuttgart. The role turns live fleet deployment data into the next generation of robotic intelligence.
At a glance
- Employment
- Full-time
- Work mode
- Remote · Stuttgart, Germany
What you'll do
- Set 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
- Make the big bets: which directions get people and compute, and which ones we stop
- Own the data strategy: the mix of deployment, teleoperation, open-source and synthetic data, and what the fleet collects next
- Own the compute strategy, from large-scale training to real-time inference on the robot
- Build the evaluation science: benchmarks that predict performance in a customer's operation, not only on a leaderboard
- Build and lead the research organisation in Zurich and Stuttgart: structure, leads, rhythm
- Set the hiring bar and make Sereact the place the best people in robot learning want to join
- Take research into production with engineering, so results reach the fleet in weeks and hold up in 24/7 operation
- Decide with the founders what we publish, open-source or patent, and build our standing at CoRL, RSS, ICRA, NeurIPS and ICML
- Be Sereact's scientific voice with customers, partners, universities and investors, and build academic partnerships
- Partner with the CTO, product and operations, so research, engineering and deployment pull in one direction
What we're looking for
- You have led research in robot learning or embodied AI (VLA models, imitation or reinforcement learning, world models) and built a team around it
- Your work runs on real robots, ideally outside the lab and for long stretches. You know what breaks first
- Scientific standing: a strong record at the top venues and a network that great researchers want to join
- You have made real calls on research bets, data and compute, and stopped what did not work
- You explain science to engineers, customers and investors alike, and you enjoy it
- PhD in machine learning, robotics or a related field, or an equivalent track record
Nice to have
- Large-scale pretraining of foundation models
- Fleet learning or data engines
- Industrial manipulation
- Experience in both academia and industry
Your team
Research organisation
Research team behind Cortex, growing with deployments from single robots to fleets; teams in Stuttgart, Zurich and Boston
Benefits
- Robots in live production that learn every day, and the data that comes with them
- A seat in the leadership team of a company scaling from Europe into the US, with meaningful equity
- Large-scale compute and the freedom to build the research organisation you would want to work in
- Teams in Stuttgart, Zurich and Boston; relocation support
How to get hired
- 1Conversations with both founders
- 2A research deep dive with the team
- 3A working session on a real problem from our deployments
Apply
Direct apply at Sereact GmbH
Opens the job posting at Sereact GmbH
About Sereact GmbH
Sereact builds the robot brain for physical work.
Sereact builds Cortex, a hardware-agnostic vision-language-action foundation model that 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. Founded in 2021 in Stuttgart, with an R&D hub in Zurich and a US office in Boston.
Key facts
- 2021
- Stuttgart, Germany
- Robotics / AI
- Cortex is a hardware-agnostic vision-language-action foundation model
- Customers include Zalando, IKEA, BMW, Rohlik and DHL
- R&D hub in Zurich and a US office in Boston
- Raised more than $145 million, most recently a $116 million Series B led by Headline, with Zalando as a strategic investor
- Fleet has recorded more than 500 million manipulation interactions in live warehouse operations
- Cortex 2.0 was trained on a curated 10 million interactions and added a world model (arXiv 2604.20246)
- Cortex 2.5 learns a new task from a few demonstrations instead of a training run
- Works in small, senior teams with a flat structure
Partners & customers
What they value
- Execution counts more than titles
- Small, senior teams with a flat structure