Director, AIT Acceleration Lead, Principal Engineer (AI)

Location: Shanghai, China; onsite role.

Company

hirify.global is a global pharmaceutical company operating in a highly regulated healthcare environment.

What you will do

• Lead Forward Deployment Engineering and AI engineering as one acceleration engine, progressing prioritized AI opportunities from framing through prototypes, proofs of concept, and validated MVPs.
• Partner with AI Product Owners in product-led PODs on product vision, scope, backlog, MVP criteria, technical feasibility, solution development, evaluation evidence, and scale readiness.
• Lead a multidisciplinary AIT FDE squad building agentic applications, RAG pipelines, system integrations, and the AI layer of the AI Empowered Consumption Layer on the China AI platform.
• Own small language model and domain model development, including data preparation, fine-tuning, distillation, evaluation, sizing, and performance testing on GPU infrastructure.
• Drive builder adoption through sample agents, reusable components, documentation, training, and an active user community.
• Manage the acceleration-to-scale transition with Digital & Technology and the hirify.global Innovation Center, ensuring ownership, architecture, evaluation evidence, funding, and transition plans.

Requirements

• Strong AI product sense and proven partnership with product owners, including discovery-to-MVP practices, value-based prioritization, and translating business problems into technical solutions.
• Experience with forward deployment and applied AI engineering, including agentic applications, retrieval, model and API integration, orchestration, prompt and context engineering, evaluation, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop design.
• Hands-on experience building RAG pipelines with embeddings, re-rankers, and vector databases, plus production-quality Python development.
• Experience developing small language and domain models through fine-tuning, distillation, and evaluation of open-weight models on GPU infrastructure, including sizing and performance testing.
• Experience rapidly moving concepts to evaluated MVPs with clear evidence; working knowledge of MLOps, LLMOps, model-cost discipline, cost-per-outcome analysis, and enterprise deployment seams.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Engineering, or a closely related discipline.
• Typically 12+ years of progressive relevant experience, including several years leading AI engineering and applied AI teams at Director-level scope and complexity; candidates with an exceptional background may be considered from 10+ years.
• Ability to work across business, product, technology, data, governance, Legal, Privacy, Risk, Compliance, and Security stakeholders in a matrixed environment.

Nice to have

• Advanced technical or business degree.
• Experience with domestic accelerators.
• Experience in a highly regulated industry and the China technology, data, privacy, or vendor environment.

Culture & Benefits

• Outcome ownership connected to measurable business, user, service, and transformation results.
• Responsible AI, reuse, architecture, security, privacy, and scale principles.
• Cross-functional POD collaboration with clear accountability and minimal handoff friction.
• Evidence-based decision-making, documentation, telemetry, and continuous improvement.
• Equal employment opportunity in accordance with applicable legislation.