Research Scientist / Research Engineer (AI Robotics)

Location: Mountain View, United States

Company

hirify.global builds generalist intelligent robots across the full robotics stack, including hardware, robot systems, infrastructure, foundation world models, and manufacturing.

What you will do

• Design and implement reinforcement learning pipelines, including reward design, online data collection, and policy optimization.
• Adapt RL algorithms such as PPO and GRPO to video prediction, with reward modeling and feedback collection for physical tasks.
• Build post-training pipelines for supervised fine-tuning, preference optimization, and behavioral alignment using robot demonstrations.
• Develop inverse dynamics models that translate video predictions into executable robot actions.
• Create evaluation frameworks for task success, generalization, and failure-mode analysis on real hardware.
• Identify policy weaknesses, improve data and training strategies, and iterate between simulation and real-robot evaluation.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience with robot systems, robotic policy learning, or autonomous systems in industry or research.
• Strong understanding of imitation learning, behavior cloning, and reinforcement learning.
• Practical familiarity with real robot hardware, deployment constraints, and vision and proprioceptive sensors.
• Strong machine learning skills with hands-on PyTorch experience.
• Ability to diagnose policy failures, reason about distribution shift, and improve data and training strategies.
• Senior candidates should execute complex research projects; staff-level candidates should independently define technical direction and research strategy.

Nice to have

• Experience with reinforcement learning applied to real or simulated environments.
• Background in robotics, autonomous driving, or physical AI.
• Experience with teleoperation, robot demonstration collection, ROS/ROS2, or real-time control systems.
• Experience with MuJoCo, Isaac Sim, Genesis, video generation models, or action prediction.
• PhD in Robotics, ML, or a related field, or publications at leading robotics and machine learning venues.

Culture & Benefits

• Work at the intersection of state-of-the-art video generation models and real robot hardware.
• Fast feedback between model changes and real-world robot performance.
• High ownership within a small team where robotics expertise is central to the mission.
• Contribute directly to reliable robot behavior in complex real-world environments.