Principal Research Scientist (Robotics)

Location: Sunnyvale, California, USA; hybrid working model with in-person collaboration in office spaces, vehicle workshops and labs

Salary: $370,040–$512,710 base salary, plus equity

Company

hirify.global is building an AI platform for autonomous driving based on embodied intelligence, real-world learning and mapless, hardware-agnostic deployment.

What you will do

• Lead research into architectures, data and learning approaches for robot foundation models.
• Design, implement and evaluate vision-language-action, world and action, omni-modal and video models for robotics.
• Develop reinforcement learning, behavioural cloning and other approaches for robot policy development.
• Curate and filter large-scale video datasets for model training and evaluation.
• Build scalable distributed training pipelines and infrastructure for large models and datasets.
• Collaborate with scientists, ML engineers, roboticists and hardware teams to connect research with real-world robot performance.

Requirements

• Deep machine-learning experience focused on vision-language models, video models, robot policies, foundation models, robotics or embodied AI.
• Experience with multi-node training, large datasets and/or large-model training.
• Strong research track record, including publications in venues such as ICRA, CoRL, CVPR, NeurIPS, ICML or ICLR.
• Strong coding skills and hands-on experience with modern machine-learning frameworks, including PyTorch debugging.
• Ability to define and drive an independent research agenda and translate research ideas into working systems, experiments or deployed capabilities.
• Strong communication skills and ability to influence technical direction across research, engineering and robotics teams.

Nice to have

• Experience with autonomy, real-world robot deployment or diverse robot embodiments.
• Contributions to external publications and scientific communication.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work combining in-person collaboration with focused remote work.
• Relocation support and visa sponsorship where applicable.
• Meaningful equity and annually benchmarked salaries.
• Learning and development budgets for training, conferences and professional growth.
• Health and dental insurance, enhanced parental leave, retirement or pension benefits where applicable, therapy access and wellbeing partnerships.

Hiring process

• Initial recruiter call lasting 30 minutes.
• Competency interviews covering PyTorch debugging and a hiring-manager interview, followed by deep-dive systems and domain-specific technical interviews.
• Final mission and values alignment interview.