Research Scientist (Robotics)

Location: Sunnyvale, California, USA; hybrid working model with in-person collaboration and remote work.

Estimated base salary: $311,450–$419,760, plus equity.

Company

hirify.global is building an AI platform for autonomous driving and embodied intelligence, using scalable learning systems to enable vehicles and robots to understand and act in the physical world.

What you will do

• Design and run experiments on architectures, learning objectives, and data strategies for robot foundation models.
• Develop scalable self-supervised, generative, supervised fine-tuning, imitation learning, and reinforcement learning methods.
• Curate, filter, mix, and evaluate large-scale egocentric, UMI, teleoperated, web video, and robot-interaction datasets.
• Build and use distributed training pipelines for large multimodal models and datasets.
• Collaborate with ML engineers, roboticists, and hardware teams to connect research progress with measurable robot performance.
• Communicate findings through internal reviews, publications, and robot demonstrations.

Requirements

• Experience in machine learning, particularly multimodal foundation models and foundation-model data.
• Experience with scalable training, multi-node training, large datasets, or large model training.
• Strong research track record, including publications in top-tier venues such as ICRA, CoRL, CVPR, NeurIPS, ICML, or ICLR.
• Strong engineering skills and hands-on experience with modern machine learning frameworks, including PyTorch debugging.
• Ability to design rigorous experiments and translate research ideas into working systems, experiments, or deployed capabilities.
• Strong communication skills and effective collaboration across research, engineering, robotics, and hardware teams.

Nice to have

• Experience with vision-language-action models, world models, action models, video models, multimodal models, or robotics foundation models.
• Experience working with mobile manipulators, dual-arm platforms, humanoids, or other embodied systems.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work combining dedicated office collaboration with focused remote work.
• Relocation support and visa sponsorship are available where applicable.
• Core hours and opportunities to work hands-on in vehicle workshops and labs.
• Equity, learning and development budgets, and support for training and conferences.
• Health and dental insurance, enhanced parental leave, retirement or pension benefits where applicable, therapy access, wellbeing partnerships, and team socials.

Hiring process

• Initial recruiter call lasting approximately 30 minutes.
• Competency interviews, including PyTorch debugging and a hiring manager interview, lasting approximately 1.5 hours in total.
• Deep-dive technical interviews, followed by a final mission and values interview.