Senior / Staff Robotics Engineer, Motion Planning (AI Robotics)

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

Salary: $160,000–$265,000 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.

What you will do

• Own the local mobility and safety stack for a fleet of humanoid robots.
• Architect and implement optimization-based local planners, including MPC, MPPI, and custom contouring control.
• Build high-performance C++ pipelines that consume semantic maps and learned costmaps from neural network systems.
• Develop center-of-mass-aware navigation that accounts for lifting columns, dual-arm payloads, slopes, rough terrain, and tipping risk.
• Build deterministic safety layers and fallback behaviors that override unsafe AI commands or compensate for SLAM tracking failures.
• Design planning interfaces for Whole-Body Control, including base trajectories, velocity limits, and dynamic constraints.

Requirements

• Ph.D. in Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field, or an M.S. degree with 4+ years of relevant industry experience.
• Deep hands-on experience with local motion planning and trajectory optimization for mobile robots in complex, unstructured environments.
• Strong knowledge of kinematics, vehicle dynamics, and center-of-mass constraints for top-heavy mobile robots on uneven outdoor terrain.
• Expertise in modern C++ with attention to real-time performance, memory management, and low-latency execution.
• Experience deploying autonomous navigation stacks on physical robotic platforms in field environments.
• Must collaborate in the Milpitas office 5 days per week.

Nice to have

• Experience with Whole-Body Control, operational space control, and synchronization between mobile bases and high-DOF manipulators.
• Experience debugging commercial SLAM or VIO systems in visually degraded environments.
• Background in slip and traction estimation using proprioceptive sensor signals.
• Experience using CUDA to accelerate grid processing or trajectory sampling.

Culture & Benefits

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