Research Scientist, VLA Models - Atlas (AI)

Location: Waltham Office, United States

Company

hirify.global develops advanced humanoid robotics, including the Atlas platform.

What you will do

• Architect, train, and deploy end-to-end vision-language-action and large behavior models for mobile manipulation on Atlas.
• Build imitation learning pipelines using human demonstrations, teleoperation, and simulation data.
• Develop policies with few-shot generalization across diverse manipulation tasks, embodiments, and environments.
• Create hierarchical behavior systems that combine learned skills into long-horizon behaviors.
• Integrate learned models into Atlas’s autonomy stack with robotics, controls, and platform teams.
• Deploy, debug, and iterate models on physical humanoid hardware while writing maintainable Python and C++ code.

Requirements

• MS with 3+ years of experience or PhD in Machine Learning, Robotics, Computer Science, or a related field.
• Experience training and deploying learned policies for complex behaviors in robots or simulated characters.
• Strong background in behavior cloning, imitation learning, diffusion policies, ACT, large behavior models, sequence modeling, and multimodal vision-language-action learning.
• Experience with PyTorch, JAX, and large-scale machine learning training workflows.
• Strong analytical and debugging skills, with the ability to write reliable, well-structured research code.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience deploying learned policies on real robots.
• Experience creating or curating large demonstration datasets from teleoperation, human demonstrations, or egocentric video.
• Experience using reinforcement learning as a complementary tool in behavior learning pipelines.
• Publications in top-tier machine learning or robotics conferences such as CoRL, RSS, ICRA, or NeurIPS.
• Experience contributing to large C++ or Python codebases.

Culture & Benefits

• Direct access to an advanced humanoid robot for frequent hardware testing.
• Collaborative and inclusive working environment that values diverse perspectives and identities.
• Opportunity to conduct applied vision-language-action research with real-world impact.
• Mission-focused work on general-purpose humanoid robotics.