Robotics State Estimation and Controls Engineer

Location: San Carlos, California, United States; onsite

Salary: $200,000–$300,000 per year plus equity

Company

hirify.global develops humanoid robots designed to perform household tasks safely in real-world environments.

What you will do

• Build state estimation for floating-base pose and velocity, joint state, contact, and force/torque signals under sensor noise, dropout, and ambiguous contacts.
• Own robot models, coordinate frames, inverse kinematics, and trajectory generation through real-time-safe APIs and bindings.
• Identify actuator, tendon, and transmission characteristics including friction, stiffness, slack, stretch, and cogging.
• Design sensor trade studies and signal-conditioning pipelines covering filtering, anti-aliasing, validity checks, and temporal consistency.
• Develop diagnostics, safety limits, fault reactions, calibration, and hardware bring-up procedures for production, service, and new robot generations.
• Set technical direction and collaborate with mechanical, electrical, firmware, production, service, and downstream motion teams.

Requirements

• Proven experience shipping state-estimation or control software on physical robots or comparable electromechanical systems.
• Deep experience implementing and tuning EKF, UKF, invariant, or complementary filters against real sensor data.
• Strong foundation in rigid-body kinematics, frame transforms, inverse kinematics, and dynamics.
• Hands-on experience with system identification and calibration of actuators, transmissions, or sensors.
• High proficiency in production-quality real-time C++ on Linux and Python for tooling and analysis.
• At least 5 years of relevant industry experience, or an advanced degree with equivalent hands-on experience.

Nice to have

• Experience with tendon-driven or cable-driven actuation, dexterous end-effectors, and non-collocated sensing.
• Experience with convex optimization, model predictive control, or trajectory optimization.
• Experience integrating visual-inertial odometry into floating-base estimation.
• Familiarity with EtherCAT, CAN, or other real-time fieldbus protocols.
• Experience bringing up robot hardware or working at the firmware and electrical boundary.

Culture & Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Paid time off, company holidays, and parental leave.
• 401(k) plan with company matching, plus FSA and HSA options.
• Commuter benefits, disability and life insurance, and an Employee Assistance Program.
• Onsite snacks and catered lunches.