Lead Humanoid Robotics System Architect (Robotics)

Location: Hybrid work model in the United States, with assigned sites in Hillsboro, Oregon; Phoenix, Arizona; Folsom, California; or Santa Clara, California.

Annual salary: $220,920–$361,480 USD.

Company

hirify.global is presented in the posting as developing next-generation computing and humanoid robotics platforms.

What you will do

• Own the hierarchical humanoid robotics control stack, including VLM/VLA systems, visuomotor policies, whole-body control, and distributed joint FOC loops.
• Define rate boundaries, latency budgets, action-chunking strategies, and interconnect topologies such as EtherCAT.
• Co-optimize large VLA and world models with compute silicon through quantization, sparsity, mixture-of-experts design, context-length selection, and deployment-envelope definition.
• Size FLOPs, sustained TOPS, and memory-bandwidth requirements while selecting compute platforms and distributing workloads across central nodes and sensor pods.
• Author system specifications covering compute, power, thermal performance, sensors, actuator networks, and safety islands.
• Lead architecture reviews, subsystem trade-offs, viability experiments, technical decisions, mentorship, and collaboration with ML, controls, electrical, firmware, mechanical, silicon, and actuator teams.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in complex cyber-physical systems, including 4–5 years in robotics, autonomous systems, or high-performance edge AI platforms.
• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related field.
• Experience owning architectures that bridge high-level AI models and real-time hardware control.
• Deep knowledge of transformer inference constraints, including quantization, action chunking, and memory-bandwidth limitations.
• Expertise in real-time distributed systems, EtherCAT, zonal sensor pods, and safety islands.
• Ability to work in a hybrid model at an assigned United States site and pass an extended background investigation.

Nice to have

• Direct experience with humanoid robots or mobile manipulators.
• Experience with VLA or foundation models such as Helix-class, GR00T, or OpenVLA.
• Experience with NVIDIA Jetson, NVIDIA IGX, custom AI silicon, or related robotics platforms.
• Battery and thermal budgeting experience for highly constrained systems.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work combining on-site and off-site work.
• Competitive pay with stock bonuses.
• Health, retirement, and vacation benefits.
• Position of Trust status with an extended education, sanctions, criminal, and civil background investigation subject to applicable law.