Staff Autonomy Engineer (Robotics)

Location: Full-time, on-site at Sunnyvale HQ, Sunnyvale, California, United States

Base salary: $240,000–$275,000 per year

Company

hirify.global is a security technology company building an autonomous security force that combines autonomous machines, AI-driven software, and security professionals in an integrated managed service.

What you will do

• Advance AI and machine learning for embodied autonomy across computer vision, learned planning, open-world generalization, and real-time decision making on deployed robotic platforms.
• Integrate large vision-language-action models to improve reasoning, situational understanding, and explainability in safety-critical environments.
• Own the intelligence-to-action loop from sensor observations and entity reasoning through world-state modeling and policy decisions that drive safe, bounded robot behavior.
• Build a closed-loop learning pipeline using production outcomes and operator feedback for model evaluation and policy improvement without modifying safety-critical boundaries.
• Drive architecture decisions across the autonomy stack and mentor engineers across perception, planning, and controls.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience shipping autonomy, planning, or decision-making systems to production in robotics, autonomous vehicles, or safety-critical platforms.
• Deep expertise in one or more of behavior planning and policy execution, imitation learning or reinforcement learning for real-world robot control, end-to-end learned autonomy systems, or large-scale machine learning for real-time decision making.
• Hands-on experience integrating learned planning or policy models with classical control systems and deterministic safety constraints.
• Strong software engineering skills in C++ and Python, including experience with real-time autonomy stacks.
• Demonstrated ability to take systems from research prototype to deployed production platform.
• Track record of driving architecture decisions across perception, planning, and controls teams.

Nice to have

• MS or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field.
• Experience with autonomous vehicles, deployed robotics, or embodied AI systems in production.
• Background in trajectory planning, behavior modeling, or autonomy policy design.
• Familiarity with VLA architectures, foundation models for robot control, or large-scale pre-trained policies adapted for real-world deployment.
• Experience building data flywheel or simulation-based training pipelines for production machine learning systems.
• Familiarity with functional safety standards, ISO 26262, or SOTIF.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time, on-site work at the Sunnyvale headquarters.
• Stock options.
• Medical, dental, and vision benefits.
• 401(k) and paid time off.