Senior Machine Learning Researcher, Large Behavior Models & Diffusion Policy (Automated Driving)

Location: Los Altos, California; hybrid workplace. The listed salary range applies to California-based roles.

Salary: $200,000–$287,500 per year, plus an annual cash bonus structure.

Company

hirify.global develops AI, robotics, automated driving, and material-science technologies to improve human mobility and quality of life.

What you will do

• Advance generative AI methods, including diffusion policy, for end-to-end perception, planning, and prediction in automated driving.
• Research and implement scalable architectures that process raw sensor data and generate vehicle trajectories for long-tail driving scenarios.
• Prototype, validate, and iterate models using imitation learning and large-scale sensor data.
• Evaluate models in closed-loop sensor simulations, closed-course environments, and real-world public-road testing.
• Develop multimodal and language-conditioned models, using external data and transfer learning to improve generalization.
• Collaborate across hirify.global, Woven by Toyota, and Toyota’s global ecosystem, and lead peer-reviewed research publications.

Requirements

• PhD or equivalent experience in robotics, embodied AI, computer science, mathematics, physics, engineering, or a related field.
• Strong record of independent research and publications in high-impact venues such as CVPR, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, CoRL, RSS, ICRA, ICCV, ECCV, PAMI, or IJCV.
• Experience formulating and completing an independent research agenda while collaborating across disciplines.
• Experience training large-scale models, including foundation models such as vision-language or text-to-video models.
• Proficiency in Python and C++ for implementing and evaluating research ideas.

Nice to have

• Experience with trajectory optimization, sampling-based planning, model predictive control, or automated driving domains.
• Experience developing production-level code for real-time operating systems.
• Experience optimizing runtime-critical systems for Linux or UNIX-like real-time operating systems on automotive-grade compute platforms.
• Experience building safety-critical software architectures.

Culture & Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• 401(k) eligibility.
• Paid vacation, sick time, and parental leave.
• Annual cash bonus structure.
• Collaborative work across Toyota entities and a diverse, inclusive research community.

Hiring process

• Include a Google Scholar link and a full list of publications with the CV.