Research Engineer (Physical AI)

Location: San Francisco, with in-person work 4 days per week in the SF Mission District office

Salary: $150K–$250K annually, plus equity

Company

hirify.global develops Daft, an open-source distributed data engine and video-native indexing infrastructure for multimodal AI and Physical AI systems.

What you will do

• Own the visual-understanding roadmap from model-family selection through production inference at corpus scale.
• Train, fine-tune, and evaluate VLMs, VQA models, embedding models, and convolutional perception models on customer datasets and benchmarks.
• Reduce per-clip annotation costs through model selection, distillation, batching, and decode pipelining.
• Build rich, queryable datasets by designing taxonomies with researchers, measuring quality, and versioning outputs.
• Partner with dataloading and storage teams to connect visual-understanding outputs to the index and GPU workflows.
• Work directly with researchers at partner Physical AI labs and use their training iterations as the feedback loop.

Requirements

• Strong familiarity with modern vision and multimodal models, including convolutional networks, VLMs, VQA, and embeddings.
• Experience running vision or multimodal models at scale on real video and sensor data, ideally for detection, tracking, segmentation, retrieval, or captioning.
• Perception experience from self-driving, robotics, visual-data, or equivalent research environments.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and large-scale data processing, including jobs running across thousands of GPU-hours of video.
• Production-oriented research engineering skills, with a strong focus on data and infrastructure.

Nice to have

• Experience training vision or multimodal models from scratch.
• ML or AI research background demonstrated through papers, citations, or research-organization experience.
• Hands-on experience with Spark, Ray, or Daft.
• Experience with embeddings, retrieval, content-aware search, labeling taxonomies, or annotation programs.

Culture & Benefits

• In-person, tight-knit engineering team working four days per week from the office.
• Startup equity and competitive compensation.
• Health, vision, and dental coverage.
• 401(k) plan with company match, commuter benefit, and flexible PTO.
• Catered lunches and dinners, team-building events, and the latest Apple equipment.