Freelance Research Data Scientist Jobs (NOW HIRING)

Aicadium is looking for a Senior Research Data Scientist to push the boundaries of computer vision and machine learning in real-world industrial settings. This is a hybrid role based in San Diego, where our U.S. headquarters is located.
You'll drive applied R&D across the full research lifecycle from conducting original research and prototyping state-of-the-art models to refining and validating them using messy, real-world visual data.

The ideal candidate brings deep technical expertise in modern computer vision, strong research instincts, and the communication skills to work effectively across research, engineering, and product teams.

Responsibilities:

• Research, prototype, and develop state-of-the-art computer vision and deep learning models spanning detection, segmentation, tracking, and vision-language tasks.
• Translate recent research into working implementations, reproducing baselines, running ablations, and quantifying practical tradeoffs.
• Own the full data lifecycle for visual tasks: dataset curation, annotation strategy, augmentation, synthetic data generation, and quality analysis.
• Collaborate closely with engineering and product teams to move models from prototype to production, including optimization for edge or latency-constrained environments.
• Communicate methods, results, and tradeoffs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
  

Skills & Requirements:

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, Machine Learning, or a related field, or a Bachelor's with equivalent research or industry experience.
• Strong foundation in modern computer vision and deep learning: image classification, object detection, segmentation, and tracking across CNNs, Vision Transformers, vision-language models, and foundation models.
• Solid grasp of deep learning fundamentals: supervised and self-supervised learning, representation learning, optimization, loss design, and rigorous model training and evaluation.
• Demonstrated ability to read, implement, and build on recent research papers, turning literature into working prototypes.
• Hands-on experience with real-world visual data: dataset curation, annotation, augmentation, synthetic data, data-quality analysis, and low-data or noisy-data settings.
• Strong applied mathematics (linear algebra, probability, statistics, optimization) and proficiency in Python with PyTorch or equivalent deep learning framework.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills - able to work across research, engineering, and product, and present technical work clearly to mixed audiences.

Nice to Have:

• Proven ability to reproduce, evaluate, and extend recent research, including careful baseline comparisons, ablation studies, and tradeoff analysis.
• Experience in robotic vision, vision-language-action systems, world models, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, or generative models for image, video, or simulation.
• Familiarity with 3D geometry, camera models, coordinate frames, and calibration.
• Publications at top-tier venues, open-source contributions, research internships, or substantial project experience in computer vision, robotics, or embodied AI.
• Hands-on experience deploying or optimizing models for production or edge environments - model compression, quantization, ONNX, TensorRT, or latency optimization.
  

About Us:

Aicadium is a global technology company delivering AI-powered industrial computer vision products into the hands of enterprises. With offices in Singapore and San Diego, California, and an international team of data scientists, engineers, and business strategists, Aicadium is operationalizing AI within organizations where advanced machine learning innovations were previously out of reach.

Team

Join a growing team of data scientists, machine learning, and software engineers in an agile development environment. Work together with some of the best in the field to tackle challenging projects and operationalize the solutions you develop across a variety of industries and use cases.

Culture

We work in a casual and collaborative startup environment. Every member of the team plays a key role in shaping the solutions we develop and creating positive business value for the companies we work with. We are building a hub of the best talent in San Diego, CA.

Benefits

Aicadium has a great benefits package to come with your salary. Benefits include PTO, Heath insurance, Vision and Dental Insurance, Life and AD&D, 401k with matching, and more!