Machine Learning Research Scientist, Mechanical Intuition in Multimodal Models

Job Title

At Toyota Research Institute (TRI), we're on a mission to improve the quality of human life. We're developing new tools and capabilities to amplify the human experience. To lead this transformative shift in mobility, we've built a world-class team advancing the state of the art in AI, robotics, driving, and material sciences.

Design and implement end-to-end modeling pipelines for machine assembly tasks, building from the ground up rather than adapting existing frameworks.

Run systematic experiments to evaluate architectural variants, data collection and curation strategies, and a range of supervised and reinforcement learning techniques for physical manipulation.

Develop and maintain rigorous evaluation protocols to measure policy performance across assembly scenarios, including generalization to novel parts, configurations, and failure modes.

Explore how modern LLMs and agentic systems can be integrated to support physical reasoning and task planning in assembly contexts.

Collaborate with researchers and engineers across TRI and Toyota's broader ecosystem to connect learning-based systems with real hardware and manufacturing workflows.

Contribute to writing and publishing research results in peer-reviewed venues.

A PhD in a relevant field such as Computer Science, Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, or a related discipline, completed recently (or nearing completion), with some post-PhD or internship work experience.

A demonstrated track record of implementing non-trivial learning systems — not just running baselines, but building pipelines and components from scratch.

Hands-on experience with policy learning, reinforcement learning, or robot learning, with strong intuitions about what makes these approaches succeed or fail in practice.

Proficiency in Python and comfort working across the full stack of a research project, from data processing to model training to evaluation.

Genuine interest in how physical products are designed and manufactured.

Familiarity with large language models, vision-language models, or agentic AI frameworks, particularly in contexts involving structured reasoning or tool use.

Experience with robot manipulation, motion planning, or sim-to-real transfer.

Exposure to manufacturing processes, assembly planning, or CAD/CAM tool chains.

Experience building or contributing to production-level research codebases.