Tech Lead, Robotic AI Model (AI)

Location: El Segundo, California, United States

Salary: $150,000–$180,000 per year, depending on experience, plus benefits and incentive plans.

Company

hirify.global is a California-based technology company developing intelligent, connected electric vehicles, robotics, and AI-enabled technologies.

What you will do

• Design post-training pipelines for vision-language-action and visuomotor policy models using supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and preference-based optimization.
• Fine-tune robot foundation models for dexterous manipulation, locomotion, whole-body control, and multi-step task sequencing.
• Build demonstration-data pipelines covering teleoperation, action tokenization, augmentation, quality filtering, versioning, and multimodal sensor integration.
• Develop simulation environments in Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, and SAPIEN, and address sim-to-real transfer through domain randomization, calibration, and real-world validation.
• Build evaluation infrastructure and optimize models for on-robot inference through quantization, action chunking, latency reduction, and real-time control integration.
• Collaborate with controls, perception, hardware, and robotics software teams while advancing research in embodied AI and generalist robot policies.

Requirements

• Master’s or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field.
• 3+ years of hands-on robot-learning experience with imitation learning, behavior cloning, or visuomotor policy training on real or simulated robots.
• Deep expertise in at least one post-training paradigm: robot-demonstration SFT, RL-based policy optimization, or diffusion/flow-matching policy training.
• Strong PyTorch and Python engineering skills, including model training and debugging at scale; familiarity with FSDP or DeepSpeed.
• Practical experience with robot simulation and sim-to-real workflows, plus knowledge of action representations, tokenization, action chunking, and diffusion-based action generation.
• Experience with ROS/ROS2, real-time control systems, robot hardware integration, and independently taking research prototypes through real-robot deployment.

Nice to have

• Experience fine-tuning VLA models such as π₀, OpenVLA, RT-2, Octo, or similar policies.
• Experience with humanoids, bi-manual arms, mobile manipulators, dexterous hands, teleoperation systems, or robot fleet management.
• Familiarity with RLHF, DPO, GRPO, LeRobot, robomimic, openpi, or related robot-learning infrastructure.
• Publications at leading robotics or machine-learning venues.
• Experience with TensorRT, ONNX Runtime, model pruning, and edge deployment.

Culture & Benefits

• Healthcare, dental, and vision benefits, free for employees with discounted family coverage.
• 401(k) options.
• Casual dress code and a relaxed work environment.
• Culturally diverse and progressive atmosphere.
• Incentive plans in addition to the salary range.