Research Manager (AI)

Location: Offices in San Francisco or Singapore; remote work available in Asia or North America with 70–80% overlap with San Francisco or Singapore time zones. Relocation and visa support is available for strong full-time candidates moving to the US or Singapore.

Company

hirify.global builds infrastructure for creating reinforcement-learning training data and evaluations for frontier AI agents, along with a marketplace for selling them to frontier labs. The company serves frontier labs, Fortune 500 companies, and startups, and has raised $16M from leading venture capital firms.

What you will do

• Set research direction for data quality, including the reliability and usefulness of tasks, trajectories, rewards, and evaluations.
• Lead research engineers from problem definition through experiments, implementation, and conclusions.
• Design and review experiments connecting model behavior and failure modes to data, environments, and reward design.
• Develop scalable methods for validating and improving training data, including trajectory audits, grader checks, and feedback loops.
• Partner with research engineers, domain experts, and data vendors to improve workflows, tools, and quality standards.
• Communicate findings and trade-offs so research insights can be applied across teams and research areas.

Requirements

• Experience leading technical research projects from open questions through evidence, decisions, and working results.
• Experience managing and mentoring researchers or research engineers while remaining technically engaged.
• Strong understanding of machine learning and reinforcement learning, including how objectives, data, and feedback shape model behavior.
• Experience with agent training data, evaluations, benchmarks, synthetic data, or model evaluation infrastructure.
• Sound experimental judgment and the ability to distinguish useful training signals from misleading tasks or metrics.
• Strong written communication skills for explaining methods and findings to researchers, engineers, and external partners.

Nice to have

• Experience building scalable data-quality systems or validation pipelines for model training.
• Experience diagnosing reward hacking, grader errors, or subtle agent failure modes.
• Experience translating research findings into tools and processes used by others.
• Early-stage startup experience and strong cross-team communication across time zones.

Culture & Benefits

• Small, technically strong team of approximately 25 people, with most employees working in person and some working remotely.
• Competitive compensation and a company scaling profitably to meet strong demand.
• US employees receive fully covered medical, dental, and vision insurance, plus 401(k) and commuter benefits.
• Office employees receive lunch and dinner, and all employees receive a company-wide holiday break in addition to PTO and paid holidays.
• Access to AI development tools including ChatGPT, Claude Code, and Cursor.

Hiring process

• Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.
• The process includes two technical interviews followed by a 2–3 day work trial.