Staff AI Researcher (Foundation AI)

About the job

At WHOOP, we’re on a mission to unlock and inspire performance for life. WHOOP empowers members to perform at a higher level through a deeper understanding of their bodies and daily lives. Our wearable technology collects rich physiological data, providing members with actionable insights into their recovery, training, and sleep.

We are seeking a Staff AI/ML Researcher to join our Foundation AI team. This team builds the multimodal foundation models that underpin WHOOP’s next generation of intelligent, personalized, and health-enhancing experiences. These models integrate data across wearable sensors, language, biomarkers, clinical information, and self-reported inputs to create scalable AI systems that understand human physiology and behavior.

In this role, you’ll serve as a staff individual contributor driving the research, development, and deployment of large-scale multimodal models. You’ll collaborate closely with data scientists, ML engineers, and cross-functional partners to push the boundaries of deep learning and ensure our models deliver measurable value to WHOOP members.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Design, train, and optimize large-scale multimodal foundation models that integrate wearable sensor data, text, biomarkers, and behavioral data.

• Conduct applied research in self-supervised learning, representation learning, and downstream task fine tuning to advance WHOOP’s core model capabilities.

• Develop scalable, distributed training pipelines for large models on high-performance compute environments.

• Collaborate with MLOps, data engineering, and software engineering teams to operationalize models for production deployment, ensuring robustness, reproducibility, and observability.

• Partner with product and research teams to translate foundation model capabilities into downstream features that deliver meaningful member value.

• Contribute to the technical roadmap and architectural direction for foundation model development at WHOOP.

• Serve as a technical mentor for other data scientists, sharing best practices in deep learning, large-scale training, and multimodal data integration.

• Ensure models adhere to WHOOP’s standards for ethical, transparent, and privacy-preserving AI.

QUALIFICATIONS:

• Advanced degree (Master’s or Ph.D.) in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

• 7+ years of experience in applied ML, AI research, or large-scale modeling, with a track record of delivering production systems.

• Expertise in modern deep learning (e.g., transformers, state space models), multimodal model training.

• Proficiency in Python and deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow).

• Experience building and scaling large datasets and training large models in mulit-node, multi-gpu distributed compute environments.

• Familiarity with best practices for data, model, and context parallelisms.

• Strong applied experience with representation learning, self-supervised methods, and post-training for downstream applications.

• Experience with reinforcement learning for post-training foundation models (PPO, DPO, GRPO etc.).

• Familiarity with MLOps best practices including model versioning, evaluation, CI/CD for ML, and cloud-based compute.

• Excellent communication skills and ability to collaborate cross-functionally with engineers, researchers, and product teams.

• Passion for WHOOP’s mission to improve human performance and extend healthspan through science and technology.