Head of Applied AI

Location: Hybrid, with three days per week in the Elizabeth, NJ office; additional office in Somerville, MA. Shuttle service is available from Brooklyn and Newark, NJ.

Salary: $240,000–$300,000 plus equity.

Company

hirify.global is a digital olfaction company developing Olfactory Intelligence models that enable computers to predict smells, generate formulas, and support commercial products.

What you will do

• Lead, hire, level, and develop ML engineers and research scientists across formulation, prediction, and generative models.
• Set the roadmap for model capabilities including formula generation, reformulation, cost optimization, molecule generation, deformulation, odor prediction, and customer-specific property models.
• Own benchmark suites, internal quality gates, contractual acceptance criteria, and customer-facing model cards.
• Deliver enterprise model commitments and manage hard accuracy targets and quarterly deadlines.
• Design experiments and annotation protocols with Sensory Science and Fragrance Development to improve the data flywheel.
• Move research models into reliable production APIs with versioning, monitoring, and drift management while remaining hands-on with code and experiments.

Requirements

• 10+ years of industry ML/AI experience with models shipped to real users.
• Experience managing, hiring, leveling, and developing ML engineers or research scientists.
• Depth in at least one area: generative models over structured or discrete objects, molecular or chemical ML, multimodal representation learning, LLM systems and evaluation, or Bayesian and experimental design.
• Experience owning production models, including versioning, monitoring, drift, and on-call responsibilities.
• Strong evaluation discipline and experience working with small, noisy, expensive datasets and human perceptual labels.
• Must be eligible to work in the United States and work three days per week from the Elizabeth, NJ office.

Nice to have

• Background in chemistry, chemoinformatics, sensory science, or biology.
• Experience delivering models for enterprise or contract-research partners.
• Experience building an ML platform or evaluation infrastructure from scratch.

Culture & Benefits

• Hands-on leadership role reporting directly to the CTO with ownership of the applied ML organization.
• Competitive compensation, meaningful equity, and potential for expanded scope as the company grows.
• Company-paid medical, dental, and vision coverage, plus a healthcare FSA.
• Flexible PTO, paid family leave, and a 401(k) savings plan with employer match.
• Commuter benefits, catered lunch three days per week, and Newark and Brooklyn shuttle service.