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Sereact is building the robot brain for physical work. Cortex, a vision-language-action foundation model, powers single-arm and dual-arm systems, mobile manipulators, and humanoids performing pick, sort, and returns handling in live production across Europe and the US. Customers include Zalando, IKEA, BMW, Rohlik, and DHL. Founded in 2021 in Stuttgart with R&D in Zurich and a US office in Boston, the company has raised over $145 million, including a $116 million Series B led by Headline with Zalando as a strategic investor.
As Chief Science Officer, you will own the research behind Cortex end-to-end and lead the real-world learning loop that turns fleet experience into the next step change in robotic capability. The company operates as both a frontier research lab and production-grade robotics company, betting that general-purpose robotic intelligence must be learned from live deployments.
Key responsibilities include: setting the research agenda for vision-language-action models, world models, planning, and learning from real-robot interaction; making strategic bets on research directions and resource allocation; owning data and compute strategies; building evaluation science with benchmarks that predict customer performance; building and leading the research organization in Zurich and Stuttgart; setting hiring standards; taking research into production with engineering so results reach the fleet in weeks; deciding what to publish, open-source, or patent; serving as Sereact's scientific voice with customers, partners, universities, and investors; and partnering with the CTO, product, and operations for alignment.
You will not own software platform, hardware, or field deployment engineering (CTO's domain), nor will you manage a separate research lab disconnected from business outcomes or the product roadmap.
In the first 90 days, you will learn the fleet, data, and team while agreeing on a research roadmap with founders and establishing one evaluation standard. By month 6, you will have a research organization with clear ownership and a release rhythm. By month 12, a new generation of Cortex should be in customer operations with measurable gains, key senior hires made, and work establishing Sereact's standing in robot learning.
The role reports to the CEO and offers a seat on the leadership team with meaningful equity, large-scale compute, freedom to build your research organization, and teams across Stuttgart, Zurich, and Boston with relocation support.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Led research in robot learning or embodied AI (VLA models, imitation or reinforcement learning, world models) and built a team around it
- Work runs on real robots, ideally outside the lab and for extended periods; understand what breaks first in production
- Strong scientific standing with a record at top venues (CoRL, RSS, ICRA, NeurIPS, ICML) and a network that attracts great researchers
- Made real calls on research bets, data, and compute; stopped what did not work
- Ability to explain science to engineers, customers, and investors
- PhD in machine learning, robotics, or related field, or 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.
