Robot Platform Engineer (Robotics)

Location: Zurich, Switzerland

Company

hirify.global develops 4NE1, a cognitive humanoid robot designed to operate safely and autonomously in real-world environments.

What you will do

• Develop and maintain the software abstraction layer connecting 4NE1 hardware capabilities with platform software.
• Integrate actuators, joints, limbs, hands, sensors, safety systems, controllers, and embedded subsystems into a unified architecture.
• Build communication pathways across embedded systems, robotics software, middleware, and higher-level applications using DDS-based systems, ROS 2, Dora, and related distributed architectures.
• Design operational state machines, including startup, calibration, homing, operational modes, fault handling, emergency stop, recovery, and safe controller switching.
• Develop watchdogs, health monitoring, diagnostics, fault detection, recovery, escalation mechanisms, and gRPC-based robot control services.
• Create platform-level integration tests, validate software in MuJoCo and Isaac Sim, support CI pipelines, and verify functionality on physical robots.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Software Engineering, Mechatronics, or a related field.
• Strong modern C++ skills, C++17 or later, plus experience with embedded or hardware-near software.
• Strong Linux development experience, including multithreading, debugging, profiling, process and memory management, and performance optimization.
• Experience developing real-time or latency-sensitive applications and integrating complex systems involving hardware, sensors, controllers, and distributed software services.
• Practical experience bringing up, troubleshooting, deploying, and integrating robotic systems on physical hardware.
• Experience with DDS communication systems, operational and fault-management state machines, gRPC, Protocol Buffers, containerized development, CI/CD, and reproducible build environments.

Nice to have

• Experience with humanoid, legged, mobile manipulator, or other complex robotic systems.
• Experience with ROS 2, Dora, Zenoh, DDS-native systems, proprietary robotics platforms, or OROCOS RTT.
• Experience integrating high-frequency control systems operating at 500 Hz–1 kHz.
• Knowledge of locomotion, balancing, whole-body control, manipulation, state estimation, QoS tuning, and middleware performance optimization.
• Experience with safety-critical systems, FTA, FMEA, cross-compilation, embedded Linux, virtualization, or open-source robotics projects.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborate across software, controls, electronics, mechanical engineering, and hardware teams.
• Work directly with real humanoid robots and physical robotics platforms.
• Contribute to a production-ready robotics platform spanning hardware, controls, middleware, and applications.