Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Tech Lead) (Robot Learning)

Location: Columbus, Ohio or remote within the United States

Company

hirify.global develops AI-driven robotic systems that adapt, learn, and operate in real-world heavy manufacturing environments.

What you will do

• Set the team’s technical direction across perception, reasoning, action generation, training methodology, data strategy, and deployment.
• Define research and engineering architectures for action-policy learning, world-model-based supervision, and policy-orchestration interfaces.
• Design hybrid physics-ML architectures for integrated locomotion, manipulation, and whole-body control on legged platforms.
• Develop phased deployment strategies that build production trust and coordinate with hardware, domain, assurance, and adjacent engineering teams.
• Mentor junior and intermediate engineers, establish engineering standards, review practices, and code-quality norms, and contribute directly to implementation.

Requirements

• Master’s or Ph.D. in Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years of hands-on robot learning experience, including shipping sim-to-real policies on real robots across multiple tasks or platforms.
• Demonstrated technical leadership, architectural ownership, and mentorship experience.
• Deep expertise in sim-to-real methods such as domain randomization, system identification, teacher-student distillation, and sim-to-online fine-tuning.
• Experience across simulation construction, policy training, data collection, real-world deployment, and failure diagnosis, plus physics-informed ML or hybrid control.
• Strong Python and C++ programming skills, with production-quality, reproducible, tested, and maintainable code; strong technical communication skills.

Nice to have

• Edge inference experience with TensorRT, ONNX, or edge-class deployment.
• Loco-manipulation, whole-body control, locomotion, or manipulation experience on quadruped or humanoid platforms.
• Precision manipulation, surgical robotics, flow-matching action heads, or visual self-supervised representation learning experience.
• Multi-skill workflow, hierarchical policy, skill sequencing, failure detection, or control-mode transition experience.
• Experience building ML infrastructure from an early stage.

Culture & Benefits

• Daily free lunch.
• Flexible PTO.
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Six weeks of fully paid parental leave, plus an additional six to eight weeks for birthing parents.
• 401(k) retirement plan through Empower.
• Employee referral bonuses and an inclusive environment where ideas are welcomed.