Senior ML Engineer, Foundation Models (AI)

TL;DR

Senior ML Engineer, Foundation Models (AI): Training and deploying the Food Foundation Model to automate food prep and assembly with an accent on large-scale robot learning and generalization. Focus on translating the latest policy learning, generative modeling, and world model research into production-ready systems for real-world physical robots.

Location: On-site in San Francisco

Company

hirify.global is accelerating the deployment of intelligent machines in food production to address massive labor shortages in the U.S. manufacturing base.

What you will do

• Define architecture, training objectives, and learning approaches for the Food Foundation Model.
• Investigate and evaluate latest foundation model architectures including VLAs, world models, and diffusion policies.
• Design pre-training, fine-tuning, and alignment pipelines to improve generalization across new food types and kitchen configurations.
• Develop evaluation frameworks that measure real-world generalization and long-horizon reliability.
• Collaborate with data and platform teams on training data requirements and model serving constraints.
• Critically evaluate recent research from CoRL, RSS, NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR for production applicability.

Requirements

• MS or PhD in Machine Learning, Robotics, Computer Science, or equivalent industry experience.
• 5+ years of experience implementing and deploying ML models for real-world robotics applications.
• Hands-on experience with large-scale model training: pre-training, fine-tuning, and post-training alignment.
• Familiarity with diffusion models, transformers, behavior cloning, or large-scale multimodal models.
• Strong PyTorch skills and solid software engineering fundamentals in Python.
• Track record of taking models from research prototype to deployed system on physical hardware.

Nice to have

• Experience with world models or generative models for robot planning and prediction.
• Background in large-scale distributed training (multi-node GPU clusters, FSDP, DeepSpeed).
• Familiarity with simulation environments like MuJoCo, Isaac Sim, or Genesis.
• Experience deploying models to edge hardware (ONNX, TensorRT, quantization).
• Prior work with contact-rich manipulation, deformable object handling, or food robotics.
• Publications at top venues such as CoRL, RSS, ICRA, NeurIPS, ICML, or ICLR.

Culture & Benefits

• High-ownership environment with startup urgency.
• Opportunity to work on the world's largest proprietary dataset for deformable food manipulation.
• Collaboration with a world-class team from Cruise, Zoox, Google, Tesla, and Amazon Robotics.
• Direct impact by shipping physical AI that serves millions of meals.
• On-site work environment (five days a week) for tight-knit collaboration.