Robotics Applied Scientist (AI)

Location: Irvine, CA, United States; on-site

Company

hirify.global develops robotics systems for mission-based physical-world autonomy.

What you will do

• Investigate representations for persistent spatio-temporal robot mission memory across missions and sites, tracking assets that move, disappear, or degrade.
• Build world models that support reasoning and planning over mission memory.
• Recover physical parameters through interaction for physics-aware digital twins.
• Combine learned and physically grounded models, using geometry and dynamics as ground truth.
• Bridge the perception-reasoning gap for long-term autonomy.

Requirements

• PhD in robotics, computer science, electrical engineering, aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, or a related field.
• Publications at top venues such as RSS, CoRL, ICRA, IROS, T-FR, T-RO, CVPR, NeurIPS, or similar on scene understanding, semantic SLAM, lifelong or spatio-temporal mapping, world models, or embodied reasoning.
• Hands-on experience applying vision-language or foundation models to spatial reasoning, memory, or long-horizon embodied question answering.
• Depth in 3D representations, including scene graphs, neural or Gaussian-splat maps, or object-centric maps, and the estimation underlying them.
• Strong Python skills and the ability to run methods on real robots using C++ and ROS 2.
• Ability to define the purpose of a representation, evaluate it, and work in a fast-paced environment where research questions are driven by deployment needs.

Nice to have

• Change detection or long-term mapping results from real deployments.
• Real2Sim, system identification through interaction, or digital-twin experience.
• Experience with behavior trees or task planning driven by language models.
• Industrial or field robotics experience.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time, on-site engineering role in Irvine, California.
• Research questions are shaped by the needs of upcoming deployments.