Postdoctoral Fellowship - Robotics and AI

Location: Palo Alto, California, or Seoul, Korea. Business travel to the Seoul office may be required.

Salary: $100,000–$125,000 per year in California; compensation is competitive and commensurate with experience.

Company

hirify.global is a robotics startup building general-purpose robotic intelligence systems with support from KRAFTON’s AI Center.

What you will do

• Design and lead an independent research agenda in robotics, AI, and human-robot interaction.
• Conduct experiments, user studies, ablations, and field deployments on real robotic hardware.
• Develop theoretical frameworks and translate them into prototype robot behaviors and deployable systems.
• Integrate models and algorithms into robot control pipelines and evaluate real-world performance.
• Collaborate with engineers, designers, and product teams to translate research into deployed systems.
• Establish evaluation metrics and disseminate findings through publications, talks, preprints, and open-source releases.

Requirements

• PhD completed or expected by the start date in Human-Robot Interaction, Human-Computer Interaction, Robotics, Computer Science, Cognitive Science, or a related field.
• Strong research contributions demonstrated through publications, preprints, or equivalent technical output.
• Experience conducting rigorous experiments, user studies, ablations, or system evaluations.
• Ability to work independently, lead a research agenda, and collaborate effectively.
• Research interests may include robot learning, reinforcement learning, imitation learning, perception, manipulation, navigation, multi-robot coordination, foundation models, safety, social intelligence, or interaction-aware control.

Nice to have

• Hands-on prototyping with physical robots or virtual agents.
• Experience with controlled user studies and participatory design.
• Familiarity with ROS, Python, or related robotics software tools.
• Experience with large language models, conversational AI, dialog systems, or applying LLMs to robot behavior and task planning.

Culture & Benefits

• Access to state-of-the-art robot platforms, datasets, compute infrastructure, and real-world deployment environments.
• Direct mentorship from the founding research team and access to the KRAFTON AI Center network.
• Collaborative, fast-moving research culture focused on independent thinking and high-quality work.
• Potential conversion to a full-time research role based on mutual interest and fit.

Hiring process

• Submit a CV, a 1–2 page research statement, and up to three representative publications or preprints.
• Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis; the anticipated start date is September 2026, with alternative dates open for discussion.