Robotics Applied Scientist (Active Perception)

Location: On-site in Irvine, California, United States

Company

hirify.global develops risk-aware, reliable, field-ready embodied AI systems for real robots, sensors, and deployments.

What you will do

• Formulate active perception problems for inspection and a broad range of robot behaviors.
• Develop viewpoint planning policies for active information gathering.
• Research calibrated confidence and abstention for vision-language reasoning on robots.
• Lead research and development through real-world experiments that demonstrate feasibility and deployability.
• Investigate and shape the technical roadmap by aligning real-world needs with technical development.
• Mentor junior team members and collaborators.

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.
• Research experience in active perception, informative path planning, vision-language models, or semantic mapping for exploration.
• Hands-on experience with vision-language or foundation models for robot perception, including the physical principles governing them.
• Fluency in Python and the ability to run methods on real robots using C++ and ROS 2.
• Fluency with uncertainty, including Bayesian or information-theoretic planning, calibration, and conformal methods.

Nice to have

• Real-robot experience in the wild.
• Experience with metric-semantic scene graphs, open-vocabulary mapping, or spatio-temporal scene representations.
• Experience fine-tuning or deploying compact vision-language models on edge computers.
• Exposure to robotic industrial inspection workflows.

Culture & Benefits

• Work directly with real robots, sensors, and field deployments.
• Develop systems that are tested on hardware and improved through real-world operation.
• Combine rigorous engineering with learning systems used in globally deployed solutions.