Lead Applied Scientist (AI Search & Brand Intelligence)

Location: Europe — Remote

Company

hirify.global develops SEO, social media, and AI-powered search products used by businesses, agencies, and SEO professionals.

What you will do

• Lead the research agenda for AI Search Optimization and Brand Intelligence, taking ambiguous problems from hypotheses through experiments, insights, and product capabilities.
• Build repeatable experiment pipelines and run studies on how AI platforms recommend and position brands across topics, intents, and regions.
• Develop evaluation frameworks for LLM outputs, prompts, and model behavior, including leakage detection and temporal or out-of-time validation.
• Apply commercial and open-weight LLMs for extraction, judging, prompt evaluation, batch inference, and agentic pipelines.
• Develop ranking, predictive, classification, clustering, and representation-learning models using large-scale SERP, backlink, content, audit, GA, and GSC data.
• Direct and mentor a small team while partnering with Product, Engineering, Marketing, and Leadership to turn findings into features, research, and GEO best practices.

Requirements

• 5–6+ years of experience in Data Science or Applied Science, with a record of taking research problems through to shipped decisions.
• Deep hands-on expertise in ranking and information retrieval, including learning to rank, NDCG, precision@K, LambdaRank, or LambdaMART.
• Current GenAI and LLM expertise, including commercial APIs, open-weight models, LLM-as-judge, agent evaluation, and model behavior analysis.
• Strong model evaluation and validation skills, including leakage detection, temporal validation, and business-aligned metrics.
• Ability to direct the day-to-day work of a small team, including technical direction, 1:1s, unblocking, mentoring, and hiring participation.
• English at B2+ level, with the ability to explain complex results to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice to have

• Gradient boosting with LightGBM or CatBoost, embeddings, representation learning, sentence-transformers, or FAISS.
• Experience analysing large-scale data in ClickHouse or a similar columnar OLAP system.
• Knowledge of SEO, search, AI visibility, Share of Prompt, or Share of Model concepts.
• MLflow or similar experiment-tracking experience.
• Publications or conference and industry research talks.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote-first work environment designed to support work-life balance.
• Direct access to hirify.global and Planable datasets, plus dedicated data and analytics engineering support.
• Dedicated LLM API budget for systematic response sampling.
• Authority to launch experiments independently and opportunities to publish research and present at conferences.
• Supportive environment focused on curiosity, creativity, lifelong learning, transparent communication, and constructive feedback.