Applied Scientist / Machine Learning Engineer (AI)

TL;DR

Applied Scientist / Machine Learning Engineer (AI): Developing the data flywheel and foundation models for embodied AI in autonomous driving with an accent on data curation, enrichment, and evaluation. Focus on scaling high-signal training data and building state-of-the-art VLM/VLA models for open-world navigation.

Location: Hybrid, based in Sunnyvale, California, USA

Salary: $311,850 – $370,000 per year

Company

hirify.global is a leading developer of Embodied AI technology focused on creating mapless, hardware-agnostic autonomous driving systems using end-to-end neural networks.

What you will do

• Mine world-scale fleet data for rare, long-tail, and safety-critical events using active learning and embedding-based retrieval.
• Develop repeatable data curation strategies and high-quality (semi-)automated labeling pipelines.
• Build and fine-tune large-scale pretrained foundation models, including VLM and VLA for embodied AI.
• Design rigorous offline and closed-loop evaluation metrics that correlate with real on-road behavior and safety.
• Use world-model-based evaluation (GAIA) to probe counterfactual scenarios at scale.
• Contribute to policy learning, reinforcement learning, and reward modeling across the foundation-model stack.

Requirements

• Masters (6+ years exp) or PhD (2+ years exp) in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or Mathematics.
• Strong track record of taking ML from research into production systems that run at scale.
• Hands-on expertise in data curation, foundation model training, or large-scale model evaluation.
• Fluency in Python and modern deep-learning frameworks such as PyTorch.
• Must be based in or able to work from the Sunnyvale office under a hybrid policy.

Nice to have

• Experience in autonomous driving, robotics, or other embodied AI domains.
• Knowledge of diffusion, autoregressive generative models, or reward modeling.
• Experience with large-scale data infra (e.g., Milvus, Ray Data, Spark, Iceberg).
• Publications at top ML venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, CoRL, or RSS.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid working policy combining office collaboration with work-from-home flexibility.
• Opportunity to work with cutting-edge AV2.0 technology and world-leading automakers.
• Inclusive work environment that values diversity and new perspectives.
• Competitive compensation package including equity.