Senior Research Engineer - Manipulation (Robotics)

Location: Boston, MA, United States; on-site

Company

hirify.global develops risk-aware, reliable, field-ready AI systems for robotics and embodied intelligence, combining research with real-world deployment.

What you will do

• Design, implement, and evaluate learning-based manipulation models and strategies for humanoid robots.
• Develop loco-manipulation capabilities integrating perception, control, and planning.
• Contribute to robotics foundation models, including model architecture, data collection, large-scale training pipelines, and deployment infrastructure.
• Train and evaluate models using imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and related approaches.
• Translate research ideas into robust, reproducible robotic systems and experimental infrastructure.
• Collaborate with research scientists, software, mechanical, electrical, product, and field teams to test and deploy systems on real hardware.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field.
• 2+ years of hands-on experience in robotic manipulation and/or robot learning in academic or industry settings.
• Strong foundation in robot kinematics, dynamics, and control, with a focus on manipulation.
• Experience with learning-based manipulation, reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and modern deep-learning models.
• Experience using PyTorch and building reproducible model-training and evaluation pipelines.
• Proven experience implementing and evaluating robotic systems on real hardware.

Nice to have

• Experience with humanoid robots or multi-fingered robotic hands.
• Experience training large-scale robot foundation models, offline reinforcement learning, or policy fine-tuning.
• Experience with simulation, web-scale, human-in-the-loop, or autonomously collected robotics data.
• Publications or open-source contributions in leading robotics or machine-learning venues.
• Experience with large-scale robotics data collection and dataset management.

Culture & Benefits

• Research is connected directly to practical, field-ready robotic deployment.
• Work in a highly collaborative, cross-disciplinary engineering and research environment.
• Rapidly prototype, run experiments on hardware, and validate results in the field.
• Balance exploratory research with concrete near-term deliverables.