Lab Automation - Robotics Systems & Simulation Engineer

Location: South San Francisco, California, United States. This is an on-site, hands-on role.

Base pay: $150,000–$185,000 annually, plus bonus and equity.

Company

hirify.global is a biotech startup using generative AI and foundation models for biology and disease to develop protein and antibody therapeutics and improve drug discovery.

What you will do

• Build reusable Real2Sim and Sim2Real workflows across robotic platforms and laboratory environments.
• Create and validate digital twins from CAD, robot and sensor models, and reconstructed scenes, including coordinate alignment, articulation, and collision geometry.
• Connect simulation, perception, motion planning, robot state feedback, and physical execution through the robot control stack; investigate simulated-versus-measured discrepancies.
• Integrate AI models and task-level state machines with simulation and robotics tools, including structured requests, action validation, and execution feedback.
• Build synthetic-data, augmentation, synchronized video, telemetry capture, replay, and evaluation workflows.
• Benchmark and improve accuracy, reliability, latency, and GPU resource use across local and cloud environments; collaborate on operator tools, installations, debugging, documentation, and laboratory integrations.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field; recent graduates with substantial relevant research or project experience may apply.
• Strong software engineering skills in one or more of Python, C++, or C#, with experience developing and debugging integrated applications in Linux.
• Hands-on experience building or extending robotics simulations or digital twins using Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, Gazebo, or comparable tools.
• Solid understanding of 3D coordinate transformations, robot kinematics, calibration, and the relationship between simulated models and physical systems.
• Experience integrating robots, sensors, or other physical systems through APIs, SDKs, ROS2, or comparable middleware.
• Familiarity with GPU computing and cloud-based workflows for simulation, AI, or data processing.
• Strong debugging and experimental skills, clear technical communication, and the ability to learn unfamiliar methods while critically validating software and AI-generated outputs.

Nice to have

• Experience with 3D reconstruction, CAD and robot-model pipelines, RGB-D perception, multi-view fusion, or learned scene representations.
• Experience integrating LLMs, vision-language models, AI agents, or Model Context Protocol servers with external tools and physical systems.
• Experience with spatial or object reasoning, active perception, or perception of transparent, reflective, or partially occluded objects.
• Experience with video understanding, human-object interaction, learning from demonstrations, imitation learning, or other robot-learning methods.
• Experience with GPU profiling, CUDA programming, accelerated inference, or edge deployment.
• Experience with 6-axis robotic arms, mobile robots, laboratory instruments, or hands-on mechanical prototyping.
• Experience mentoring students, interns, or junior engineers.

Culture & Benefits

• Hands-on ownership of robotics and simulation systems in a state-of-the-art biotechnology laboratory.
• Cross-disciplinary work spanning biology, mechanical and computational engineering, AI, software, automation, and scientific teams.
• Access to advanced robotic platforms, scientific instrumentation, GPU computing, and AI development tools.
• Technical mentorship, opportunities to mentor research interns and residents, and cross-disciplinary growth.
• Competitive compensation and benefits package including base salary, bonus, and equity, with an open, flexible, and collaborative work environment.