System Identification & Controls Engineer (Robotics)

Location: San Mateo, California, United States

Company

hirify.global is developing general-purpose robotic intelligence using data-driven machine learning to enable robust robot operation in unseen scenarios.

What you will do

• Plan and run system identification across robot actuators, transmissions, joints, rigid-body dynamics, and sensors.
• Design excitation trajectories and bench or on-robot experiments to answer specific modeling questions.
• Characterize motors and actuators using dynamometers, test benches, and hardware-in-the-loop setups in collaboration with electrical, mechanical, and firmware teams.
• Fit and validate dynamics models, quantify accuracy, and reduce the sim-to-real gap.
• Apply state estimation, calibration, stability analysis, and bandwidth analysis to real hardware.
• Build fleet-scale automation, quantify unit-to-unit variation, monitor drift and wear, and identify outlier robots.

Requirements

• MS or PhD in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Controls, Robotics, Aerospace, or a related field, or equivalent hands-on experience.
• Demonstrated hands-on system identification experience on real robotic or electromechanical hardware.
• Strong foundation in feedback and feedforward control, cascade control, frequency-response and stability analysis, state estimation, and Kalman filtering.
• Knowledge of motors and field-oriented control, transmissions, encoders, IMUs, and force-torque sensors.
• Practical experience with excitation design, hardware data collection, and time- or frequency-domain parameter estimation.
• Proficiency in Python and C++ in a Linux environment.

Nice to have

• Experience with MATLAB or Simulink.
• Familiarity with MuJoCo, Isaac Sim, Drake, Pinocchio, ROS, or ROS2.
• Experience deploying calibration or controls across a large fleet of robots or vehicles.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on general-purpose robotic intelligence designed to adapt to unseen scenarios.
• Collaborate across electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and firmware disciplines.
• Contribute to establishing system identification standards and tooling for a growing robot fleet.
• Join a team combining new graduates, experienced engineers, and domain experts.