Staff Robotics Engineer (Autonomous Underwater Vehicles)

Location: Hybrid role requiring regular on-site work at the Richmond, California office. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without visa sponsorship.

Base salary: $190,000–$235,000 annually in the San Francisco Bay Area, plus employee benefits and equity.

Company

hirify.global Ocean Exploration builds and operates autonomous underwater vehicles that collect georeferenced ocean-floor data and deliver bathymetric and imagery products through its platform.

What you will do

• Own the architecture of vehicle software across onboard systems, GNC, state estimation, sensing, vehicle management, and mission autonomy.
• Lead complex cross-disciplinary robotics problems and improve autonomy for long, continuous missions with minimal intervention.
• Define standards and drive testing across simulation, hardware-in-the-loop, and field trials.
• Build fault detection, isolation, and recovery, safe-state and abort behaviors, graceful degradation, telemetry, runbooks, and sustainable on-call operations.
• Standardize software across the vehicle fleet and implement versioned over-the-air deployment with rollback.
• Mentor robotics engineers, align teams across hardware and software, manage the roadmap, and champion production-ready AI tooling.

Requirements

• 8+ years building robotics or autonomous-systems software, including 5–7 years in commercial production robotics environments, with staff-level technical leadership.
• Strong C++ and/or Python skills and hands-on ROS or ROS 2 experience on real hardware.
• Depth in GNC, state estimation, sensor fusion, or mission autonomy, with breadth across the other vehicle-software disciplines.
• Experience with FDIR, health monitoring, safe-state behaviors, fleet software standardization, over-the-air updates, versioning, and rollback.
• Experience with physical, safety-critical systems, intermittent connectivity, and field operations, including participation in an around-the-clock on-call rotation.
• Must be able to work regularly from the Richmond, California office and have U.S. work authorization without visa sponsorship; eligibility for a U.S. Secret security clearance is required.

Nice to have

• Experience with underwater, marine, aerial, or ground autonomous vehicles.
• Familiarity with sonar, cameras, inertial/navigation systems, and sensor fusion.
• Experience taking autonomy or vehicle systems through field deployment.
• Production experience applying AI or AI agents in engineering or autonomy.
• Professional, academic, or personal connection to the ocean.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on autonomous ocean systems supporting maritime security, infrastructure, energy, and climate applications.
• Comprehensive employee benefits and equity.
• Technical ownership over architecture, reliability, and fleet-scale autonomy.
• Direct collaboration across robotics, GNC, hardware, sensing, software, and field operations.