Autonomy Engineer (VLA Pre-training)

Location: San Diego, California, United States; on-site

Base salary: $180,000–$300,000 USD per year

Company

hirify.global develops commercially scalable and safe hirify.global robots, including the HMND-01 platform for real industrial environments.

What you will do

• Pre-train base models on multi-embodiment trajectory data and fine-tune policies for specific tasks.
• Post-train policies with behavior cloning and reinforcement learning, owning the loop from data collection to deployment.
• Define data quality requirements, identify failure modes, and coordinate collection of diverse, high-coverage datasets with internal and external partners.
• Run pre-training, mid-training, and post-training on the VLA stack while exploring new modalities and model architectures.
• Build continuous pipelines for synthetic data and teleoperation logs, including versioning, weak-supervision labeling, dataset curation, and automated failure-case discovery.
• Scale distributed training and optimize models for real-time edge inference with MLOps and Data Platform teams.

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience building deep learning systems in industry or research, with shipped models or published artifacts.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs, VLMs, or image/video generative models, including architecture, training, and inference.
• Experience with streaming datasets, checkpointing, state management, and distributed training strategies.
• Strong Python and PyTorch or JAX skills, including numerical profiling, debugging, and maintainable research code.
• Familiarity with modern software engineering practices and clear technical documentation.
• Ability to work on-site in San Diego, California.

Nice to have

• Experience in robotics or autonomous driving.
• Experience applying reinforcement learning to LLMs or robotics.
• Experience with vision-language-action models, OpenVLA, Physical Intelligence models, or similar frameworks.
• Experience productizing deep learning models under latency and throughput constraints, including telemetry and on-device optimization.
• Publications at top-tier deep learning conferences or equivalent open-source contributions.

Culture & Benefits

• Fully paid medical, dental, and vision insurance for US-based employees, with virtual care and employee assistance resources.
• 23 accrued PTO days, separate sick leave, and paid company holidays.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Equity participation.
• Daily catered lunch, snacks, and drinks in the office.
• Opportunity to collaborate with engineers, researchers, and product experts in AI and robotics while owning key initiatives.