Senior / Staff AI Research Engineer, Data Infrastructure (Physical AI)

Location: Milpitas, California, United States; 5 days per week in-office

Salary: $185,000–$325,000 USD annually, plus bonus and equity

Company

hirify.global is an AI robotics company developing Physical AI-powered robots for demanding industrial environments and real-world deployment at scale.

What you will do

• Design and maintain end-to-end pipelines for multimodal demonstration data from teleoperation devices and UMI hardware.
• Build annotation tooling and curation workflows for quality filtering, deduplication, episode scoring, and domain reweighting.
• Develop post-SFT reinforcement learning infrastructure for reward scoring, failure-pattern mining, and retraining feedback loops.
• Build evaluation infrastructure that logs on-robot policy rollouts and provides actionable diagnostics.
• Collaborate with ML researchers on data schemas, episode formats, and interfaces for VLA and manipulation policy training.
• Architect scalable cloud and on-premise storage and retrieval systems for heterogeneous robot data.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Robotics, or a related field, with 5+ years of experience.
• Strong Python skills and experience building production-grade data pipelines and ETL systems.
• Experience with large-scale dataset management, versioning, deduplication, quality filtering, and distributed storage such as S3, GCS, HDF5, WebDataset, or Zarr.
• Experience with post-training infrastructure, including SFT pipelines, reward modeling, or RL training loops such as PPO, DPO, or rejection sampling.
• Familiarity with PyTorch, JAX, and ML training workflows.
• Requires working in the office five days per week in collaboration with the teams.

Nice to have

• Experience with robotics data-collection hardware such as teleoperation devices, UMI, or GELLO.
• Familiarity with imitation learning, behavior cloning, or VLA/VLM fine-tuning.
• Experience with evaluation and experiment-tracking infrastructure such as Weights & Biases, MLflow, or custom rollout loggers.
• Experience designing annotation tooling or human-in-the-loop labeling systems for structured or multimodal data.

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive stock options and equity programs.
• Health, dental, and vision insurance.
• 401(k) plan.
• Visa sponsorship and green card support are available for qualified candidates.
• Lunches, dinners, a stocked kitchen, and regular team-building events.