Chief Science Officer, AI R&D

About Verden KlikeVerden Klike (VER-dn KLEE-kuh), Danish for “World Clique,” is a global community mixed reality (Co-MR) startup dedicated to healing the world’s historic levels of loneliness. Inspired by the Nordic countries’ leading happiness levels, our mission is to evolve spatial computing so people can form deep connections through shared passions.A core feature of the platform is vercasts: live or on demand motion captured Co-MR events for wellness, concerts, podcasts, theater, education, and more. Imagine a guided meditation atop Mount Everest or dancing with a new friend to a motion captured Irish folk band aboard the Titanic. We are building technology that serves as a practical prescription for isolation by enabling experiences that transcend space and time.Verden operates at the intersection of Co-MR and high fidelity motion capture, with a long term vision of photorealistic, full body embodied experiences powered by distributed AI compute.About the RoleWe are seeking a Chief Science Officer, AI R&D to lead the scientific and technical development of an open source markerless motion capture AI. This system will deliver high quality face, body, and hand mocap from infrared video, solving hard problems including occlusion and multi subject capture. The resulting technology will power professional vercasts and accessible home Co-MR full body mocap experiences.You will drive research strategy, university collaborations, data pipelines, model development, and open source release while ensuring the AI meets the fidelity required for strong place, embodiment, co-presence, and plausibility illusions in Co-MR.Key ResponsibilitiesDefine and lead the scientific roadmap for an open source markerless mocap AI capable of high quality simultaneous face, full body, and hand tracking from monocular or multi-view infrared video.Collaborate closely with faculty, researchers, and students across multiple universities to advance the state of the art in computer vision, pose estimation, and generative or reconstruction models for human motion.Design and oversee large scale training datasets and pipelines that leverage high fidelity ground truth data from OptiTrack full body and hand marker based systems combined with iPhone based facial mocap.Solve critical technical challenges including robust performance under occlusion, multi person simultaneous capture, temporal consistency, and real time or near real time inference suitable for live vercasts and home Co-MR use.Guide architecture decisions, training methodologies, evaluation metrics, and benchmarking against both marker based systems and existing markerless approaches.Drive open source strategy: code quality, documentation, licensing, community engagement, and sustainable release of models, datasets (where appropriate), and tools.Recruit, mentor, and lead a high caliber research and engineering team focused on AI for human motion and embodiment.Translate research advances into production ready components that integrate with Verden’s Co-MR platform, vercast production pipelines, and future home full body mocap experiences.Stay at the forefront of relevant literature in computer vision, human pose/shape estimation, neural rendering, and related fields.Partner with product, engineering, and content teams to ensure scientific progress directly supports user experience goals around embodiment and social presence.Required QualificationsAlignment with Verden’s mission of using technology to eliminate loneliness.Expertise in Computer Science, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a closely related field.Demonstrated leadership experience, ideally including directing AI R&D efforts with multi institution or academic collaborations.Strong communication skills for collaborating with academic partners, internal teams, and the broader open source community.Preferred QualificationsProven ability to take research prototypes toward robust, scalable systems.Hands-on expertise in modern deep learning for computer vision (PyTorch/TensorFlow or equivalent), 3D human modeling, temporal modeling, and handling real world video challenges such as occlusion and multi person scenes.Experience working with or generating high quality motion capture data (marker based systems such as OptiTrack strongly preferred) and facial performance capture.Prior work on markerless mocap, multi view or monocular 3D human reconstruction, hand/face tracking, or real time human performance capture.Experience releasing and maintaining successful open source AI projects or datasets.Familiarity with real time graphics pipelines, avatars, or XR systems.Track record of successful university partnerships or industry-academia research programs.Understanding of the unique requirements of embodiment and social presence in mixed reality.Why Join Verden KlikeYou will lead foundational AI research that directly enables magical, high fidelity Co-MR experiences designed to help people connect more deeply. The work combines rigorous science, open source impact, and a clear human centered mission at a company operating at the frontier of community mixed reality.If you are excited to build the open source mocap foundation for the next generation of shared spatial experiences, we would love to hear from you.https://www.verdenklike.com/