Member of Technical Staff, Forward Deployed Engineer

WHO WE ARE

Odyssey https://odyssey.ml is an AI lab pioneering general world models: causal, multimodal systems that learn to predict and interact with the world over long horizons. This foundational technology promises to revolutionize robotics, science, healthcare, education, gaming, defense, and beyond.

Odyssey’s founders previously pioneered the most complex application of physical AI: self-driving cars. They’ve now brought together a world-class research team from DeepMind, Tesla, Waymo, Meta, Apple, and Wayve, who have made significant contributions to language models (DeepMind Gemini), video models (DeepMind Veo), world models (Wayve GAIA), and autonomous systems (Tesla FSD).

Odyssey has raised significant venture capital from GV, Amazon, AMD, EQT, NVIDIA, Natural Capital, In-Q-Tel, Elad Gil, Jeff Dean, Guillermo Rauch, Garry Tan, Kyle Vogt, and researchers from OpenAI, DeepMind, MSL, Recursive, and Thinking Machines.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

We’re hiring Forward Deployed Engineers to bring Odyssey’s world models into high-impact, real-world environments.

This role sits at the intersection of research, engineering, product, and our partners. You’ll work directly with customers to understand problems that cannot be solved with conventional software, translate those problems into research questions, and build working systems around Odyssey’s models.

This is not a traditional research engineering role. You’ll be expected to modify models, design experiments, build new conditioning and control methods, develop evaluation frameworks, and turn ambiguous partner needs into technical breakthroughs. The strongest work will both solve an immediate application and influence Odyssey’s core research roadmap.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Embed closely with strategic customers to understand their workflows, technical constraints, data, and highest-value problems.

- Identify where world models can create a step-change in capability, particularly across robotics, simulation, autonomy, training, interactive media, and other physical or visual domains.

- Translate loosely defined customer goals into concrete research and engineering problems, technical hypotheses, prototypes, and deployment plans.

- Adapt and extend Odyssey’s models for specific applications through fine-tuning, post-training, conditioning, controllability, inference optimization, and learned control policies.

- Build end-to-end prototypes that connect world models to customer data, tools, simulators, hardware, and production systems.

- Design application-specific evaluations that measure whether a model is useful, controllable, consistent, and reliable under real operating conditions.

- Diagnose failures in deployed systems and determine whether the solution belongs in data, modeling, training, inference, evaluation, or product design.

- Create fast feedback loops between customer deployments and Odyssey’s core research teams, turning field observations into general research advances.

- Work shoulder-to-shoulder with researchers, engineers, product teams, and customer stakeholders from initial exploration through deployment.

- Develop reusable infrastructure, methods, and playbooks so that successful work with one partner can accelerate future deployments.

- Communicate technical decisions and experimental results clearly to both deeply technical teams and senior customer stakeholders.

- Publish or share case studies when appropriate while protecting customer confidentiality and operational requirements.

WHO YOU ARE

- Deeply technical, with experience in world models, generative video, multimodal learning, robotics, autonomous systems, reinforcement learning, computer vision, or large-scale machine learning.

- An unusually strong builder. You can move from an ambiguous problem to an experiment, prototype, and deployed system without waiting for a detailed specification.

- Comfortable modifying models as well as building the systems around