Research Scientist - World Model
You'll turn Luma's industry-leading generative video models into world models: interactive, controllable, physically faithful, and useful as a substrate for embodied reasoning. This is the role at the center of the thesis.
You'll invent next-generation world-model architectures and the controllability that lets an agent step into a generated world, and own the metrics that define success. It fits a researcher with deep generative-modeling or model-based-RL expertise who has trained models to the limits of a multi-node cluster. If you want a narrow, well-scoped research problem, this is broader and more open-ended than that.
What You'll Own
- Invent next-generation world-model architectures (diffusion, transformer, autoregressive, or hybrid), focused on controllability and physical consistency.
- Develop controllability mechanisms — action conditioning, view conditioning, long-horizon rollouts — that let an agent step into the world.
- Define and own the metrics: physical fidelity, long-horizon coherence, action-following, and downstream usefulness for policy training.
- Run scaling studies that show where compute, data, and architecture pay off.
- Publish at the frontier and contribute to the open-source release that is the long-term deliverable.
First 90 Days
One way the first 90 could unfold.
- Days 1–30 — Immerse & Diagnose: Get deep on the current video models and where they fall short as world models.
- Days 30–60 — Ship & Validate: Prototype a controllability mechanism or architecture change and measure it against physical-fidelity and action-following metrics.
- Days 60–90 — Scale & Systemize: Run scaling studies and push the most promising direction toward the open release.
What You Bring
- PhD or equivalent research record in ML, computer vision, robotics, or a related field.
- Deep expertise in at least one of: large-scale generative modeling (video/3D/world), self-supervised representation learning, or model-based RL.
- Strong PyTorch and large-scale training experience, to the limits of a multi-node cluster.
- A research record the field knows (top-venue publications and/or widely used open releases).
Nice to Have
- Prior work on world models, model-based RL, generative video, neural simulation, or 4D scene representations.
- Experience using generative models for downstream embodied tasks (planning, control, evaluation).
- Enthusiasm for open-sourcing frontier models.
About Luma: Luma's mission is to build unified general intelligence that can generate, understand, and operate in the physical world. We believe multimodality is critical for intelligence — the next step beyond language models comes from vision. Luma is an equal opportunity employer.
About Luma AI
Luma AI is a generative AI startup that enables users to transform text descriptions into corresponding 3D models.
More jobs at Luma AI
- Software Engineer - Data Infrastructure
- Staff Security Software Engineer
- Staff Product Software Engineer
- Software Engineer, Inference
- Simulation Researcher/Engineer
- Research Scientist / Engineer – Training Infrastructure
- Research Scientist / Engineer – Reinforcement Learning Infrastructure
- Research Scientist / Engineer – Performance Optimization
- Research Scientist / Engineer — Foundation Model (Agent)
- Product Manager, Growth