AI Autonomy Engineer (Aerospace)

Location: San Jose, California, United States

Salary: $160,000–$235,000 base pay annually

Company

hirify.global develops advanced air mobility technologies, including air taxis, unmanned aircraft systems, and physical AI solutions for commercial aerospace and defense.

What you will do

• Develop and integrate vision-language, VLA, perception, and language model systems.
• Design benchmarks, evaluate success and failure modes, and compare results with internal baselines and published research.
• Fine-tune and adapt foundation models for new domains while assessing technical trade-offs.
• Validate models through data-driven testing in simulation, on hardware, and during flight tests.
• Deploy and monitor models on edge hardware under real latency and power constraints.
• Partner with Safety and Simulation Engineers to evaluate model outputs.

Requirements

• 8+ years of relevant experience; hiring is currently focused on Senior and Staff-level positions.
• Master’s degree, PhD, or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Robotics, or a related field; exceptional bachelor’s candidates may be considered.
• Hands-on experience building, fine-tuning, or integrating vision-language or VLA models.
• Strong understanding of transformer architectures, multimodal foundation models, and practical fine-tuning of pretrained checkpoints.
• Strong PyTorch or comparable framework skills, with the ability to own model-serving integration end to end.
• Experience building an initial 0→1 product or system and working effectively with ambiguity.

Nice to have

• VLN or embodied-agent navigation experience in aerial, ground, or indoor robotics.
• Experience with reinforcement learning, imitation learning, or self-supervised training for navigation or control.
• Edge deployment experience with NVIDIA Jetson-class hardware or comparable platforms.
• Experience creating evaluation tooling or benchmarks for data-driven decisions.
• Experience with safety-critical or regulated engineering processes in aerospace, automotive, or medical devices.

Culture & Benefits

• Join an approximately 100-person AI Products software organization within an aerospace company.
• Work on early-stage products with the resources and momentum of an established organization.
• Performance-based compensation tied to business impact.
• Equal opportunity workplace committed to diversity, inclusion, and reasonable accommodations.