Senior AI Researcher - World Foundation Models

NVIDIA is hiring a Senior AI Researcher to work on world foundation models, with a focus on human appearance, motion, and action understanding. The role sits at the applied-research boundary: you develop and validate model improvements, then harden them into production-grade checkpoints and recipes other teams can build on. It is based in Canada or the United States.

The team is building AI systems that can perceive, reason about, and generate dynamic worlds, with the goal of high-fidelity, temporally stable video and world generation for Physical AI, simulation, and interactive experiences. Progress is measured through disciplined experimentation, diagnostics, and repeatable side-by-side evaluation. You would work closely with data, platform, and product engineering so improvements translate into real performance and quality.

What you will do

• Research, implement, and validate model architecture and algorithm changes that improve video generation fidelity, with emphasis on human-centric quality.
• Explore and prototype improvements across spatial multimodal modeling, modality alignment, flow-based or diffusion-based video generation, and neural rendering-inspired representations to improve controllability and long-horizon consistency.
• Improve training and inference efficiency through architectural and post-training techniques, including compute and memory optimizations, distillation, pruning, and compression.
• Define model training objectives that improve sim-to-real and real-to-sim generalization, especially for human motion, contact, and interaction dynamics across real-world and synthetic or simulation data.
• Develop detailed, domain-specific benchmarks for evaluating world foundation models, especially generation and understanding models that reason about video, simulation, and physical environments.
• Translate research results into implementations such as training code, production-grade checkpoints, model integrations, and demos that show capability gains across teams.

What they are looking for

• PhD in Computer Science, Graphics, Computer Engineering, or a closely related field, or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of applied research and/or industry experience in vision, graphics, or adjacent ML domains or a similar area.
• 3+ years of direct experience designing, training, and evaluating generative models for image, video, or audio, with strong fundamentals in modern deep learning.
• Hands-on experience improving generative models with a focus on perceptual quality and temporal stability, especially for generating humans.
• Advanced proficiency in Python, PyTorch, C++, and CUDA, with strong research-engineering practices such as reproducibility, testing, profiling, and experiment tracking.
• Experience training and debugging large models in multi-GPU and/or multi-node environments and distributed training workflows.
• Practical knowledge of inference and runtime bottlenecks and optimization techniques.
• A strong eye for quality and interest in diagnosing visual artifacts such as sharpness, texture detail, and temporal stability using perceptual metrics, human preference signals, or learned evaluators.

Ways to stand out

• A track record in related research, including publications at top conferences such as NeurIPS, CVPR, or ICLR, with clear evidence of impact on model quality or robustness.
• Experience using agentic workflows and AI coding companions to accelerate research and production development, including code generation, debugging, test creation, experiment automation, benchmark development, documentation, and large-codebase navigation.

Pay and location

The base salary range is 184,000 USD to 287,500 USD for Level 4, and 224,000 USD to 356,500 USD for Level 5. Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and the pay of employees in similar positions. You will also be eligible for equity and benefits.

Applications will be accepted at least until June 27, 2026. This posting is for an existing vacancy. NVIDIA uses AI tools in its recruiting processes.

About NVIDIA

NVIDIA has been transforming computer graphics, PC gaming, and accelerated computing for more than 25 years. The company says it is committed to an inclusive work environment and is an equal opportunity employer, and that it does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by law.