Research Scientist, VLA Models - Atlas

Location: Waltham Office, United States of America

Base pay: $177,000–$225,000 annually

Company

hirify.global develops advanced humanoid robots, including Atlas, for general-purpose real-world applications.

What you will do

• Architect and train end-to-end VLA and Large Behavior Models for mobile manipulation on Atlas.
• Build imitation learning and behavior cloning pipelines using human demonstrations, teleoperation, and simulation data.
• Develop pre-training and fine-tuning workflows for multimodal robot learning and precision manipulation tasks.
• Create policies that generalize across diverse factory manipulation tasks, embodiments, and environments.
• Integrate learned models into the Atlas autonomy stack with robotics, controls, software, and hardware teams.
• Deploy, evaluate, and iterate on models using physical hardware; write maintainable Python code for a production codebase.

Requirements

• MS with 3+ years of experience or PhD in Machine Learning, Robotics, Computer Science, or a related field.
• Experience training and deploying learned policies for complex behaviors in robots or simulated characters.
• Strong background in behavior cloning, imitation learning, diffusion policies, World Action Models, and other state-of-the-art methods.
• Experience with multimodal vision, language, action, and tactile robot learning.
• Experience with PyTorch, JAX, simulators, and large-scale training workflows.
• Strong analytical and debugging skills, with the ability to write and review well-structured research code.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience deploying learned policies on real robots.
• Experience creating or curating large robotics datasets, including teleoperation, UMI, and egocentric video.
• Experience using reinforcement learning as a complementary tool in behavior learning pipelines.
• Publications in top-tier machine learning or robotics conferences such as CoRL, RSS, ICRA, or NeurIPS.
• Experience contributing to large C++ or Python codebases.

Culture & Benefits

• Direct access to an advanced humanoid robot for frequent hardware testing.
• Collaborative and inclusive team environment that values diverse perspectives and identities.
• Applied research with real-world impact in general-purpose humanoid robotics.
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage, 401(k), paid time off, and an annual bonus structure.