Robotics Engineer, Foundation Model (AI)

Location: Tokyo, Japan; hybrid workplace

Company

hirify.global develops robotics systems and foundation models for autonomous robots operating in real stores and warehouses.

What you will do

• Design, train, fine-tune, and deploy large-scale multimodal, transformer-based, and Vision-Language-Action models for robotic perception, reasoning, and control.
• Build data and training pipelines covering teleoperation data collection, preprocessing, annotation, and distributed training.
• Collaborate with robotics, controls, and hardware engineers to integrate models into real robot systems and production environments.
• Design evaluation protocols for model performance, safety, and reliability, then iterate using real-world deployment feedback.
• Optimize models for efficient inference and deployment on embedded and edge hardware.
• Track foundation model, LLM, multimodal, and generative AI research and assess its applicability to products.

Requirements

• Background in machine learning, computer science, robotics, or a related field.
• Professional experience in machine learning or deep learning engineering, or equivalent research or graduate experience.
• Hands-on experience training, fine-tuning, or serving large-scale models such as LLMs, vision-language models, diffusion models, or other multimodal and foundation models.
• Strong software engineering skills in Python and experience with a deep learning framework, preferably PyTorch.
• Familiarity with large-scale or distributed training and modern ML infrastructure or MLOps practices.
• Professional proficiency in English is required.

Nice to have

• Experience with robotics, ROS/ROS2, reinforcement learning, or embodied AI.
• Experience with Vision-Language-Action or other multimodal foundation models.
• Experience deploying models to edge devices such as NVIDIA Jetson.
• Background in computer vision, NLP, generative modeling, control theory, teleoperation, or actuator and hardware integration.
• Publications, open-source contributions, or a portfolio of applied ML/AI work; Japanese language skills are a plus.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on foundation models that control physical robots rather than only predicting text or images.
• Collaborate with multidisciplinary robotics, controls, hardware, and AI teams.
• Contribute to taking physical AI from prototypes to real-world deployment.
• Scope and responsibility are aligned with the candidate's experience and expertise.