Principal Software Engineer (AI)

TL;DR

Principal Software Engineer (AI Engineering): Developing and optimizing post-training recipes and model architectures for autonomous driving with an accent on RL, SFT, and multi-modal models. Focus on driving the production rollout of model evolutions and bridging the gap between research and onboard deployment.

Location: Hybrid or Onsite in Mountain View, California

Salary: $349,000—$431,000 USD

Company

hirify.global is an autonomous driving technology company building the hirify.global Driver to improve mobility and safety globally.

What you will do

• Prototype and experiment with onboard model designs and training recipes to verify model architecture before production.
• Develop necessary data and evaluation infrastructure to enable rapid model experimentation.
• Drive the technology roadmap for post-training techniques, specifically RL and training recipe evolutions.
• Lead the production rollout of major model architectures to solve diverse behavior contexts in autonomous driving.
• Facilitate strong collaborations between onboard engineering and research teams across hirify.global and Alphabet.
• Evolve the post-training recipe roadmap to achieve capability goals and continuous production impact.

Requirements

• Must be based in or able to work from Mountain View, California.
• Hands-on experience in post-training techniques, such as RL and SFT.
• Deep theoretical and practical understanding of model architectures in Robotics, VLA, or VLM.
• Proven track record of building SOTA models and managing the entire model development process.
• Production-driven mindset with strong ownership of quality, rigor in evaluation, and timely delivery.
• Strong communication skills and organizational awareness for cross-functional collaboration.

Nice to have

• Experience in model optimization and model-compute codesign.
• Track record of driving cross-organizational transitions for large-scale systems.
• Experience with modern ML data, training, and inference systems for large models.
• Proven ability to coach and grow other engineers and technical leaders.
• Domain experience in robotics or autonomous vehicles (AV).

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive base salary with a discretionary annual bonus program.
• Equity incentive plan.
• Generous comprehensive company benefits program.
• Access to millions of miles of real-world driving data and diverse sensor sets.
• Collaborative environment with close ties to Alphabet research teams.