Principal Data Scientist (AI)

Location: Remote, New Jersey, USA

Salary: $140,000.00–$200,733.33 per year

Company

hirify.global develops and publishes scientific, educational, and research content and technology.

What you will do

• Design and build production NLP enrichment pipelines that extract entities, classifications, claims, and summaries from scientific full-text at scale.
• Compare traditional NLP, embedding-based retrieval, LLM prompting, and fine-tuned smaller models, selecting approaches based on evaluation, cost, and operational tradeoffs.
• Build golden evaluation sets with subject-matter experts and vendors, select metrics, and balance speed, quality, and cost.
• Write production-quality Python and manage concurrency and cost for high-volume LLM workloads.
• Collaborate with data engineers to orchestrate reliable, idempotent, retryable, and evaluable pipeline stages using Airflow and Dagster.
• Contribute to agentic AI applications and collaborate with editors, product managers, and engineers to turn modeling needs into product work.

Requirements

• Deep Python experience in production and at scale, including the ability to choose between asyncio, threads, and queues and explain the tradeoffs.
• Strong NLP experience across LLMs, transformers, embeddings, retrieval, NER, classification, and sequence labeling.
• Experience building evaluations, comparing modeling approaches, defending technical choices with evaluation and cost estimates, and responding to performance drift.
• A track record of shipping production systems that deliver value to real users, rather than only prototypes or papers.

Nice to have

• Experience working with scientific or scholarly text.
• Familiarity with AWS, including S3, Batch, Lambda, and SageMaker, as well as Parquet or Iceberg data lake patterns.
• Experience running LLMs in production under real cost and latency budgets.
• Exposure to agentic AI applications, including tool use, multi-step reasoning, guardrails, and trajectory evaluation.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote full-time role with a focus on bold ideas, diverse perspectives, curiosity, and measurable impact.
• Small, senior team in which data scientists own models in production and remain accountable for outcomes.
• Meeting-free Friday afternoons for focused work and professional development.
• Learning, community, and internal mobility programs.
• Competitive compensation and a comprehensive benefits package.
• Equal opportunity employer with reasonable accommodation available during the application process.

Hiring process

• Attach a resume or CV when applying.