Research Engineer (Robotics)

Location: San Francisco or Singapore offices; remote options in Asia and North America, with remote candidates required to maintain 70–80% working-hours overlap with either San Francisco or Singapore time zones. Relocation and visa support are available for strong full-time candidates moving to the US or Singapore.

Base salary: $80,000–$230,000 annually, adjusted for experience and location. San Francisco and other major US cities: $135,000–$230,000; Singapore: $100,000–$175,000; rest of world: $80,000–$175,000.

Company

hirify.global builds infrastructure, marketplaces, and data systems for AI training and evaluation, backed by $16M in funding.

What you will do

• Research data needs for robot learning and physical AI systems and translate them into dataset and evaluation specifications.
• Define schemas, annotations, ground truth, and quality standards for robotics data.
• Design collection and review protocols for external data providers.
• Build validation tools and workflows to audit datasets, identify quality issues, and provide actionable feedback.
• Run experiments and analyze model behavior to determine how data quality, coverage, and structure affect performance.
• Collaborate with research, engineering, data vendors, and buyers to improve robotics data offerings.

Requirements

• Experience in robotics, robot learning, embodied AI, or related multimodal research.
• Proficiency in Python and experience building data processing, analysis, or evaluation tools.
• Ability to translate research questions into dataset specifications, experiments, and measurable quality criteria.
• Strong understanding of useful and misleading robotics data for model training and evaluation.
• Strong attention to detail when identifying errors, coverage gaps, and failure modes in complex data.
• Experience building research tools or pipelines without a fully prescribed roadmap.

Nice to have

• Experience with robot trajectories, demonstrations, video, sensor data, simulation, or multimodal robotics datasets.
• Experience with imitation learning, reinforcement learning, or vision-language-action models.
• Early-stage startup experience and ownership from research through production deployment.
• Strong communication skills for collaboration across teams and time zones.

Culture & Benefits

• Approximately 25 people, mostly working full-time in person, with some remote employees.
• Competitive compensation and location-adjusted salary bands.
• US employees receive fully covered medical, dental, and vision insurance, plus 401k and commuter benefits.
• Office employees receive lunch and dinner.
• Company-wide holiday break from Christmas Eve through New Year’s Day, in addition to PTO and paid holidays.
• Access to tools and tokens for ChatGPT, Claude Code, Cursor, and similar products.

Hiring process

• Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.
• Two technical interviews followed by a 2–3 day work trial.