Research Engineer, Robotics - Roboticist (AI)

Location: Seattle, WA; expected to work from the Seattle offices. On-site requirements vary by position and team.

Base salary: $128,880–$193,320 per year, plus bonus plans.

Company

hirify.global is a Seattle-based nonprofit AI research institute building foundational AI research and open-source innovation across robotics, large-scale models, data, and conservation.

What you will do

• Own real-time joint, impedance, operational-space, and torque-control stacks for arms, hands, and humanoids.
• Bring up and stabilize whole-body controllers, state estimation, contact handling, recovery, and sim-to-real transfer for humanoid and bimanual systems.
• Set up, calibrate, maintain, and tune robots, cameras, tactile sensors, grippers, and multi-fingered hands.
• Diagnose stability, latency, contact, hardware, firmware, control, and learned-policy issues.
• Design and build end-effectors, sensor mounts, fixtures, and test rigs from CAD through 3D printing or machining.
• Build teleoperation, data collection, logging, monitoring, deployment, and operator tooling; contribute to open-source releases and publications.

Requirements

• Master’s degree with 3+ years of experience, or PhD, in robotics, control, or a related field; candidates with a bachelor’s degree and 3+ years of industry experience may also be considered.
• Hands-on implementation and tuning of real-time controllers on physical robots, with knowledge of rigid-body dynamics, control theory, stability analysis, and system identification.
• Experience with floating-base dynamics, contact constraints, inverse dynamics, and QP-based whole-body control, operational-space control, or MPC on hardware or in a high-fidelity simulator.
• Substantial real-robot manipulation experience, including robot bring-up, calibration, and control of arms with grippers or hands.
• End-to-end robot software system design, including 500 Hz–1 kHz control loops, state estimation, data flow, and planning, perception, and learning interfaces.
• Strong Python and solid real-time C++; ability to reason about latency, reliability, failure modes, and full-stack debugging.
• Experience designing and building hardware used on real robots; CAD required, with design-for-manufacturing for 3D printing or machining.
• Experience training or deploying imitation learning, reinforcement learning, or VLA policies on real robots; familiarity with PyTorch and Isaac Lab, MuJoCo, or a similar simulator.
• Clear, structured, systems-oriented communication.

Nice to have

• Humanoid whole-body control on hardware, including locomotion, loco-manipulation, balance, contact-rich tasks, and Unitree G1, H1, or comparable platforms.
• Lyapunov, passivity-based, compliant, contact-stable, and dynamical-systems control methods, plus reduced-order models.
• Whole-body policy sim-to-real transfer using GPU-accelerated simulators, domain randomization, actuator modeling, and safety wrappers.
• Whole-body state estimation, sensor fusion, Kalman filtering, bimanual systems, multi-fingered hands, or tactile sensing.
• Teleoperation, large-scale data collection, ROS 2, DDS, Zenoh, real-time Linux, containerization, CI/CD, hand-eye calibration, multi-camera calibration, depth sensing, or 3D perception.
• Open-source contributions or publications at robotics venues such as CoRL, RSS, ICRA, IROS, or Humanoids.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative, transparent, inclusive learning organization with a focus on open-source research.
• Medical, dental, vision, life, disability, and employee assistance coverage, with HSA, HRA, and FSA options.
• 401(k), annual bonuses, and participation in a long-term incentive plan.
• $125 monthly commuting or internet support and $200 monthly fitness and wellbeing support.
• Up to 10 sick days, 7 personal days, 20 vacation days, 12 paid holidays, and family leave.
• Physical requirements include remaining stationary for long periods, observing details at close range, communicating accurately, and working under deadlines.