AI Research Engineer - Dexterous Manipulation (Egocentric Models)

Location: Zürich, Switzerland; work is based in the Zürich office

Company

hirify.global is building the intelligence layer for humanoid robots, combining robot reinforcement learning and foundation-model research to enable real-world deployment.

What you will do

• Architect scalable pre-training objectives for egocentric video datasets covering hand-object interactions and spatial-temporal dynamics.
• Develop multimodal Vision-Language-Action foundation models that convert visual perception and language instructions into robotic trajectories.
• Design generative action heads using diffusion models and flow-matching techniques for complex human movements.
• Align human-centric video representations with the kinematic constraints of humanoid systems with 20+ degrees of freedom.
• Use offline reinforcement learning and high-fidelity simulation fine-tuning to improve physical manipulation success rates.
• Translate research on scaling laws and world models into production-ready architectures for robot reliability and autonomy.

Requirements

• PhD or Master’s degree in Robotics, Machine Learning, or a closely related field, with a focus on data-driven manipulation, egocentric vision, or foundation models.
• Experience with humanoid or dexterous manipulation and contact-rich physics.
• Strong knowledge of Python, PyTorch, and distributed training of large-scale neural networks, including FSDP and NCCL.
• Expertise in diffusion models, flow matching, and transformers.
• Hands-on experience deploying learning-based controllers on real robot hardware.
• Experience with reinforcement learning and simulation environments such as IsaacLab or MuJoCo.

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive compensation.
• Enhanced pension plan and holiday and paid-leave benefits.
• Relocation and permit sponsorship are available.
• Central Zürich office with robotics testing facilities and infrastructure.
• Collaborative, action-oriented environment with regular community events.
• Exposure to advanced robotics research and humanoid deployment challenges.