Principal Applied AI Engineer

Location: McLean, Virginia; office presence required 5 days per week

Base salary: $200,000–$350,000 USD per year, plus potential discretionary bonus.

Company

hirify.global provides AI-powered process automation for complex, mission-critical work in large enterprises and governments.

What you will do

• Architect, build, operate, and optimize high-performance production LLM systems.
• Design AI capabilities spanning code generation, agents, retrieval, structured generation, tool use, model routing, evaluation, and observability.
• Lead architecture, technical story breakdowns, acceptance criteria, prototyping, and delivery across complex AI-powered application layers.
• Improve availability, latency, scalability, efficiency, and reliability in high-volume production services.
• Drive code quality, modernization, refactoring, code reviews, and automation frameworks across the engineering organization.
• Coach engineers, close skill gaps, influence technical decisions, and publish technical documentation.

Requirements

• Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science or a related technical or analytical discipline; a degree is required.
• 10+ years of relevant software development experience with a bachelor's degree, or 8+ years with a related master's degree.
• Deep hands-on experience designing and operating production LLM systems and AI coding assistants.
• Strong foundations in distributed systems, APIs, security, reliability, and high-volume mission-critical production services.
• Ability to influence engineering direction beyond one team and communicate complex architectures to diverse technical audiences.
• Ability to work onsite at the McLean, Virginia headquarters 5 days per week.

Nice to have

• Experience with compilers, program analysis, formal or executable specifications, or legacy modernization.
• Experience with enterprise platforms such as Salesforce or ServiceNow.

Culture & Benefits

• In-person collaboration in a fast-paced engineering environment focused on technical precision and high code quality.
• Training, mentorship, onboarding support, and continuous learning resources.
• Flexible time off, paid parental leave, medical, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance.
• 401(k) plan with company match, flexible spending accounts, health savings account contributions, and wellness programs.
• Tuition reimbursement, employee stock purchase program, family-forming benefits, and potential equity eligibility.
• Employee-led affinity groups and community programs supporting inclusion and professional development.