AI Research Engineering Lead

Location: Zurich, Switzerland, with full-time in-person work; San Francisco-based candidates will also be considered. Relocation to Zurich is supported.

Company

hirify.global is a physical AI and robotics company building general-purpose dexterous manipulation systems, including video-action models and in-house dexterous hand hardware.

What you will do

• Co-lead the AI team and advance multimodal video-action models with stronger generalization for industrial robotics tasks.
• Lead research, architecture design, and training for large-scale multitask foundation models across pre-training and post-training.
• Manage the end-to-end data pipeline from human teleoperation data specification through training, fine-tuning, and real-world robot evaluations.
• Guide AI research engineers and scientists while setting standards for ML engineering, experimental velocity, and empirical evaluation.
• Partner with hardware and robotics teams on data collection, model benchmarking, and stable real-world deployment.

Requirements

• PhD in computer science or machine learning, or equivalent PhD-level industry research experience.
• 3+ years of experience building and scaling generative architectures such as diffusion, flow matching, autoregressive, vision-language, or video models.
• 4+ years of hands-on PyTorch or similar development, including multi-GPU pre-training with FSDP, DeepSpeed, or Megatron and knowledge of scaling laws.
• Proven experience mentoring engineers, supervising PhD interns, or leading collaborative research projects.
• Based in or willing to relocate to Zurich for full-time, in-person work; San Francisco-based candidates will also be considered.
• Deep model-building experience is required; classical control/RL without generative modeling and application-level RAG/API wrapper experience are out of scope.

Culture & Benefits

• Direct ownership of core AI strategy in a flat, fast-moving environment.
• Modern GPU compute and hardware test benches.
• Free gym and sports subscriptions and team meals.
• Full relocation support.
• Close collaboration with founders and robotics specialists.