Lab Automation - Robotics Engineer (AI)

Location: South San Francisco, California, United States

Salary: $150,000–$180,000 annually, plus bonus and equity

Company

hirify.global is a biotech startup developing generative AI and foundation models for drug discovery, protein and antibody therapeutics, biology, and disease research.

What you will do

• Build, integrate, maintain, and debug robotics software for robotic arms, mobile robots, sensors, grippers, and laboratory devices.
• Develop motion planning, manipulation, perception, safety logic, and task execution frameworks for autonomous and semi-autonomous laboratory workflows.
• Integrate laboratory instruments through APIs, IoT interfaces, schedulers, and custom control software.
• Benchmark computer vision methods for detection, segmentation, tracking, pose estimation, localization, and scene understanding.
• Create simulation and digital twin environments for motion validation, workflow testing, synthetic data generation, and debugging.
• Collaborate with scientists and engineering teams on automated protocols, material handling, sample tracking, validation, logging, and error recovery.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field.
• Strong software engineering skills in Python, C++, C#, or comparable modern programming languages, with experience in cloud-based workflows and production software systems.
• Familiarity with robotics frameworks such as ROS2 and MoveIt, or comparable tools.
• Familiarity with computer vision, perception, motion planning, robotic manipulation, or sensor integration.
• Comfort working hands-on with physical hardware, debugging real systems, and learning through practical work.
• Strong problem-solving, communication, and cross-disciplinary collaboration skills.

Nice to have

• Experience with robotic arms, autonomous mobile robots, grippers, machine vision, automated material handling, or laboratory instruments.
• Experience with OpenCV, SLAM, localization, scene understanding, or robotics simulation tools such as Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, or Gazebo.
• Experience with agentic AI frameworks, MCP, language-model tool integrations, foundation models, reinforcement learning, or imitation learning.
• Familiarity with biological or chemical assays, including PCR, microscopy, high-throughput screening, or cell-based assays.
• Experience with CAD, 3D printing, laser cutting, CNC machining, or rapid prototyping.

Culture & Benefits

• Opportunity to build an automated biology laboratory and robotic systems for high-throughput biological research.
• Exposure to robotics, laboratory automation, data infrastructure, and AI-enabled experimental systems.
• Structured mentorship from robotics, automation, software, and scientific leaders.
• Interdisciplinary work on drug discovery projects in a supportive and innovative environment.
• Competitive benefits package with base salary, bonus, equity, and professional development opportunities.