Principal Engineer, NLP (AI)

Location: Hybrid role based in San Diego, California, United States

Salary: $182,700–$274,000 annually

Company

hirify.global develops the Autonomous Knowledge Platform, helping enterprises turn data, knowledge, and business context into reliable AI-powered workflows.

What you will do

• Define the strategic roadmap and architecture for NLP and language understanding across the Knowledge Platform.
• Design and build NLP systems for entity and relationship extraction, document understanding, semantic indexing, summarization, question answering, conversational AI, and multilingual processing.
• Develop retrieval-augmented generation, agentic workflows, reasoning systems, and evaluation methods for factuality, grounding, trustworthiness, and task completion.
• Build NLP pipelines supporting enterprise knowledge graphs, semantic layers, entity resolution, taxonomy mapping, and graph-based reasoning.
• Scale distributed NLP systems that process petabytes of enterprise content across on-premises, cloud-native, and hybrid environments.
• Lead research-to-production initiatives, publish or patent innovations, contribute to open source, and mentor senior engineers.

Requirements

• PhD or MS in Computer Science, AI, ML, Computational Linguistics, NLP, or a related field.
• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including 8+ years building production NLP and machine learning systems.
• Deep expertise in transformer architectures, large language models, RAG, semantic search, information retrieval, knowledge extraction, conversational AI, and knowledge graphs.
• Strong programming skills in Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow or JAX, Spark, and distributed computing frameworks.
• Experience with vector databases, embedding models, search engines, distributed ML infrastructure, and model evaluation or observability platforms.
• Established industry expertise with a record of taking advanced NLP research into production at scale.

Nice to have

• PhD and published research in NLP, information retrieval, machine learning, or AI.
• Experience serving hundreds of millions of users or processing billions of documents.
• Open-source contributions, patents, or publications at major AI and NLP conferences.
• Experience leading enterprise copilots, intelligent assistants, autonomous agents, or graph-based reasoning systems.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible work model with a people-first and inclusive culture.
• Health care, life and disability insurance, retirement savings, and time-off programs.
• 401(k) retirement savings plan and annual incentive eligibility for permanent roles.
• Collaboration with distinguished engineers, architects, researchers, and product leaders.