Principal Machine Learning Engineer, Matching & Recommendations (AI)

Location: Austin, Texas, United States; on-site

Salary: $345,000–$410,000 per year

Company

hirify.global builds dating, friendship, and relationship products including hirify.global Date, BFF, and Badoo.

What you will do

• Define the technical and machine learning strategy for recommendation, ranking, personalization, and AI systems across hirify.global products.
• Design, develop, and deploy production-grade models and AI agents using PyTorch, foundational LLMs, sub-agents, tools, and MCP integrations.
• Architect end-to-end ML pipelines spanning data processing, model training, evaluation, and deployment with tools such as Spark and Airflow.
• Build experimentation frameworks using A/B testing and offline evaluation to improve model and product outcomes.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Data Science, and Analytics leadership to solve ambiguous member problems and influence technical decisions.
• Mentor senior individual contributors and champion fairness, transparency, safety, and responsible AI practices.

Requirements

• 10–15 years of experience or equivalent demonstrated expertise.
• Deep hands-on experience building and deploying large-scale machine learning systems in production.
• Strong Python skills and proficiency with a major ML framework such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Experience with recommendation systems, ranking models, NLP, prompting, LLM fine-tuning, and production AI agents.
• Experience designing scalable data and ML pipelines using Spark, Airflow, or similar distributed systems.
• Ability to influence technical strategy as a senior individual contributor, collaborate cross-functionally, and mentor others.

Culture & Benefits

• Work focused on building healthy and equitable relationships and friendships.
• Culture centered on Excellence, Curiosity, Respect, inclusion, and continuous learning.
• Responsible use of AI and human-led hiring decisions.
• Reasonable adjustments are available throughout the hiring process.

Hiring process

• AI tools may support interview recording, transcription, summarization, and job alignment.
• Participation in AI-supported interviews is voluntary and candidates may opt out without affecting candidacy.