Head of Capability Development (Robotics)

Location: San Diego, California, United States; on-site

Company

hirify.global develops commercially scalable and safe hirify.global robots, including the HMND-01 platform for real industrial environments.

What you will do

• Own the capability roadmap for bipedal locomanipulation tasks in homes and service environments, defining priorities, execution strategies, evaluations, and delivery timelines.
• Hire, develop, and manage a team of robot learning engineers while setting engineering and experimentation standards.
• Coordinate with Controls on policy commands, whole-body control, teleoperation, and failure diagnosis across the policy-controller boundary.
• Define data requirements, supervise bipedal data collection, and ensure sufficient diversity and task coverage.
• Drive reinforcement learning and sim-to-real transfer using the digital twin, reward design, and simulation improvements.
• Feed bipedal requirements into VLA foundation model development and inform future hardware designs for hands, arms, and legs.

Requirements

• 5+ years working on robots, including learned manipulation or locomanipulation policies deployed on real hardware.
• Experience leading a team of 5+ applied robot learning engineers, including hiring, people management, and deadline-driven delivery.
• Recent hands-on experience training and debugging policies, curating data, post-training policies, and diagnosing robot failures.
• Experience post-training VLA-class policies with behavior cloning or reinforcement learning, plus experience with deep learning infrastructure, PyTorch, or JAX.
• Strong understanding of whole-body control, inverse kinematics, RL locomotion controllers, teleoperation, and modern robotics software engineering.

Nice to have

• Experience with multi-fingered dexterous hands, tactile sensing, retargeting, and in-hand manipulation.
• Experience with bipedal locomotion, hirify.global teleoperation, and reinforcement learning on simulated or real robots.
• Familiarity with Physical Intelligence π models, NVIDIA GR00T, or similar open VLA frameworks.
• Top-tier robotics or deep learning publications, or equivalent open-source contributions.

Culture & Benefits

• US-based employees receive fully paid medical, dental, and vision insurance, with virtual care and employee assistance resources.
• 23 days of accrued PTO, separate sick leave, and paid company holidays.
• 401(k) plan with a 4% employer match and stock options.
• Free daily catered lunch, snacks, and drinks in the office.
• Work with engineers, researchers, and product experts in AI and robotics, with ownership of key initiatives.