Locomotion & Whole-Body Control Engineer (Humanoid Robotics)

Location: Zurich, Switzerland

Company

hirify.global is building the control intelligence and humanoid robot 4NE1 for movement, manipulation, and safe interaction in complex real-world environments.

What you will do

• Develop whole-body motion generation and control algorithms for locomotion, balancing, contact transitions, and loco-manipulation.
• Design trajectory optimization and MPC pipelines using robot state, contact schedules, ground reaction forces, centroidal momentum, and joint trajectories.
• Build QP-based whole-body control and task-space inverse-dynamics frameworks running at up to 1 kHz on physical robots.
• Develop floating-base rigid-body dynamics, kinematics, Jacobian, contact, friction, stability, torque, and joint-limit models and constraints.
• Improve solver performance, numerical robustness, and real-time reliability while deploying and tuning controllers on humanoid hardware.
• Collaborate with controls, hardware, simulation, perception, AI, and systems engineers to deliver integrated humanoid capabilities.

Requirements

• MSc or PhD in Robotics, Controls, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field.
• 4+ years of hands-on experience with locomotion, MPC, trajectory optimization, and/or whole-body control for physical robotic systems.
• Strong knowledge of floating-base articulated rigid-body dynamics, contact modeling, centroidal dynamics, SRBD, LIPM, optimal control, and constrained optimization.
• Experience deploying whole-body control frameworks such as TSID, inverse dynamics, or hierarchical QP controllers on real robotic hardware.
• Experience with real-time control systems operating at 500 Hz–1 kHz, actuator limits, state-estimation uncertainty, communication latency, contact uncertainty, and model mismatch.
• Strong C++ skills and good Python proficiency for tooling, diagnostics, testing, and prototyping.

Nice to have

• Direct experience with humanoid or other floating-base, high-DOF robots.
• Familiarity with Pinocchio, MuJoCo, Crocoddyl, OCS2, TSID, IPOPT, CasADi, or similar frameworks.
• Experience with dynamic walking, balance recovery, push recovery, multi-contact locomotion, and manipulation-aware whole-body coordination.
• Experience with torque-controlled robots and high-bandwidth electric actuation.
• Publications at RSS, ICRA, IROS, or CoRL in locomotion, whole-body control, optimization, or humanoid robotics.

Culture & Benefits

• Work as part of a multidisciplinary Humanoid Controls team.
• Collaborate across controls, hardware, simulation, perception, AI, and systems engineering.
• Develop and validate algorithms directly on physical humanoid robots.