AI Research And Development Engineer (Physical AI)

TL;DR

AI Research And Development Engineer (Physical AI): Building the end-to-end stack for robotic hirify.globalligence and scaling foundation models to the physical world with an accent on Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies and edge deployment. Focus on optimizing models for real-time execution on constrained hardware and creating open-source tools for the robotics community.

Location: Remote (Must live and work from the Netherlands)

Company

hirify.global is a global technology leader developing the Open Edge Platform and OpenVINO toolkit to bridge high-level reasoning and real-time physical action in robotics.

What you will do

• Implement and fine-tune state-of-the-art Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies for robotic manipulation and control.
• Optimize VLA models for edge deployment via export pipelines, graph optimization, and precision calibration.
• Develop safety runtimes to manage action clamping, velocity limits, and workspace bounds.
• Build model-agnostic inference APIs that abstract across different robotic platforms and hardware backends.
• Support deployment across various edge accelerators and inference runtimes to ensure hardware compatibility.
• Write and publish research papers at top-tier venues on vision, physical AI, and robotic learning.

Requirements

• Must live and work from the Netherlands.
• Extensive experience with PyTorch and PyTorch Lightning, including distributed training for large-scale models.
• Hands-on experience with robotic systems (industrial, AMR, humanoid) and software stacks like ROS.
• Deep understanding of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) architectures and imitation learning for embodied agents.
• Technical expertise in model export, graph compilation, operator fusion, and precision calibration.
• Familiarity with inference runtimes such as OpenVINO, ONNX Runtime, or ExecuTorch.

Nice to have

• PhD in robotics, machine learning, computer vision, or a related field.
• Contributions to open-source robotics, embodied AI, or model optimization projects.
• Background in low-level performance profiling and hardware-aware optimization for edge devices.

Culture & Benefits

• Opportunity to build open-source tools used by the entire robotics community.
• Ownership of the full pipeline from model training to physical hardware control.
• Prioritization of real-world utility and performance over theoretical metrics.
• Work on a hardware-agnostic stack supporting the next generation of physical hirify.globalligence.