Principal Robotics Engineer (AI)

Location: Remote, based in Irvine, California

Company

hirify.global develops risk-aware, field-ready embodied AI systems for real-world robotic deployments.

What you will do

• Set technical direction across the autonomy software stack, covering perception, localization and mapping, planning, and control.
• Architect production-grade systems and define stable API contracts between autonomy components and the broader software platform.
• Improve production quality through testing, code review, profiling, observability, diagnostics, and architectural discipline.
• Lead complex technical efforts across multiple teams, mentor senior and staff engineers, and influence decisions without formal management authority.
• Translate learning-based traversability, foundation models, and learned planning methods from research prototypes into reliable deployed capabilities.
• Lead root-cause analysis of fleet-wide reliability and performance issues affecting robots in real-world conditions.

Requirements

• Master’s or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent industry experience.
• 10+ years of experience building production robotics or autonomy software with Principal- or Staff-level technical impact.
• Deep expertise in modern C++ and Python, with strong command of ROS/ROS2, Linux, and Git.
• Experience architecting large-scale autonomy systems across at least two of perception, SLAM/localization, planning, and control.
• Strong foundation in real-time systems, concurrency, and performance optimization.
• Ability to lead cross-team technical initiatives, make architectural trade-offs, and communicate them clearly to engineers and stakeholders.

Nice to have

• PhD with a strong publication record in robotics, perception, or machine learning.
• Hands-on experience with both legged and wheeled robot platforms.
• Experience with learning-based navigation, traversability, planning, vision foundation models, or reinforcement learning.
• Experience with Isaac Sim, Gazebo, or MuJoCo.
• Experience deploying robot fleets in harsh or unstructured real-world environments and using tools such as Prometheus or Grafana.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on robots, real sensors, and field deployments where software is tested on hardware.
• Contribute to embodied AI systems operating in globally deployed real-world environments.
• Technical leadership is centered on architecture, mentorship, and cross-team influence rather than people management.