VP of Robotic Foundation Model (AI)

Location: Tokyo, Japan; hybrid workplace

Company

hirify.global develops robotics and automation technologies for real-world operational environments.

What you will do

• Build, lead, and grow the robotics foundation model team, including hiring, mentoring, performance management, and capability development.
• Define the roadmap, technical direction, priorities, resources, and execution standards for robotic foundation model initiatives.
• Guide vision-language-action model architecture, training strategy, scaling, fine-tuning, representation learning, and inference optimization.
• Oversee teleoperation and robot-operation data collection, curation, annotation, dataset creation, evaluation assets, and continuous learning pipelines.
• Lead deployment of trained models on embedded and edge platforms such as Jetson-class systems, integrating them with robot control and autonomy systems.
• Define KPIs and evaluation processes for model quality, autonomy, safety, reliability, and operational robustness, and represent the technical work with partners and vendors.

Requirements

• Proven experience leading or managing high-performing ML, robotics AI, or multimodal foundation model teams.
• Experience taking advanced AI or robotics systems from research or prototype stages into reliable real-world operation.
• Deep expertise in large-scale multimodal models, including vision-language, vision-language-action, or transformer-based systems.
• Experience integrating AI/ML systems with physical robots, robotics software stacks, sensing, action representation, and hardware deployment.
• Strong experience building data pipelines and distributed training systems for multimodal datasets containing images, video, text, robot trajectories, and sensor logs.
• Strong English communication skills required; Japanese proficiency is a plus.

Culture & Benefits

• High-performance, high-accountability working environment.
• Ownership-oriented culture focused on outcomes and reliable product behavior.
• Close collaboration across AI, robotics, teleoperation, controls, hardware, infrastructure, and product teams.
• Opportunity to develop robotics AI for real operational environments beyond research prototypes and proof-of-concept demonstrations.

Hiring process

• Optional supplementary materials may include project portfolios, demos, publications, repositories, or videos.
• Candidates may provide evidence of technical contributions, leadership scope, team-building experience, and operational results.