Staff AI Engineer

Location: Illinois, United States; hybrid/remote

Salary: $174,000–$262,000 per year, plus annual performance bonus and long-term incentives.

Company

hirify.global builds hirify.globalOne, an AI-powered cloud platform for legal data intelligence, litigation, investigations, regulatory inquiries, and other high-stakes legal workflows.

What you will do

• Set technical direction across the Discovery portfolio and build complex systems from prototype through production.
• Own end-to-end inference paths covering retrieval, context construction, model routing, agent orchestration, tool interfaces, structured output, graceful degradation, and observability.
• Build evaluation practices with golden sets, offline suites, regression gates, and online quality telemetry.
• Optimize token economics, latency, routing, caching, model tiers, and inference cost using quantitative measurements.
• Architect reusable data and retrieval layers with batch and streaming pipelines, indexing, embeddings, hybrid search, tenant isolation, and lineage.
• Improve defensibility through citation fidelity, confidentiality controls, human review paths, auditability, drift detection, root-cause analysis, design reviews, and mentorship.

Requirements

• 7+ years building and operating large-scale distributed cloud systems.
• 3+ years shipping production model-backed systems used by real customers.
• Deep experience with LLMs, RAG, agentic workflows, prompt and context engineering, vector and hybrid search, orchestration frameworks, and observability for non-deterministic systems.
• Experience owning evaluation sets, metrics, error analysis, and quality gates.
• Architecture accountability across cloud services and data pipelines in multi-tenant SaaS, including scalability, reliability, and security.
• Technical leadership across teams without formal authority and strong written decision-making skills.

Nice to have

• Experience in legal technology, eDiscovery, search, document intelligence, or other defensible and auditable domains.
• Experience with multi-agent systems, MCP servers, model-facing tools, or skill interfaces.
• Experience reducing inference costs through routing, distillation, caching, or smaller fine-tuned models.
• Experience with governance, monitoring, traceability, Azure, Kubernetes, CosmosDB, or progressive delivery.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid/remote work arrangement.
• Competitive base salary with an annual performance bonus.
• Long-term incentives and compensation based on experience, qualifications, and internal pay equity.
• Culture focused on transparency, innovation, shared success, and measurable impact in legal technology.