Lead AI Engineer (LLM)

Location: Bellevue, Washington, United States; hybrid working model with work-from-home and on-site presence at client or hirify.global offices

Salary: $155,000–$167,750 per year

Company

hirify.global is a management consulting and technology firm that combines data, science, technology, and human ingenuity to create solutions and products for clients in healthcare and other critical business areas.

What you will do

• Design and implement LLM-powered applications using transformer models.
• Build and optimize RAG pipelines with embeddings, chunking strategies, vector search, and hybrid search.
• Develop prompt engineering workflows, structured outputs, and tool-augmented LLM agents.
• Fine-tune and evaluate models using LoRA, PEFT, instruction tuning, and human-in-the-loop methods.
• Optimize inference for latency, GPU utilization, and cost through quantization, batching, and caching.
• Build FastAPI REST services, deploy LLM and RAG endpoints, and integrate AI systems with production software, CI/CD, monitoring, and reliability processes.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• 4+ years of hands-on machine learning experience with production LLM systems.
• Strong knowledge of machine learning, deep learning, transformer architectures, prompt engineering, embeddings, and vector search.
• Backend API development experience with FastAPI, asynchronous programming, rate limiting, Python, type hints, Pydantic, SOLID principles, and design patterns.
• Experience with vector databases such as Pinecone, Weaviate, or Chroma, plus MLflow, model versioning, and A/B testing.
• Fluency in English and readiness to work in a hybrid Bellevue-based environment with travel required for client-facing work.

Nice to have

• Experience with Langfuse for LLM observability.
• Experience working with NLP and computer vision.

Culture & Benefits

• Cross-functional skills development and customized learning pathways.
• Milestone training programs aligned with career progression.
• Internal mobility opportunities and role expansion paths.
• Comprehensive rewards supporting health, financial security, time away, and professional development.
• Collaborative, client-first environment with opportunities to work across different projects and cultures.