Associate Director/Director, Inference Engineering (AI)

Location: Cambridge, MA, USA or San Francisco, CA, USA

Expected base salary range: $204,000–$348,000 USD annually, with bonus potential and early-stage equity.

Company

hirify.global is building AI systems and proprietary AI Science Factory instruments to execute the scientific method autonomously across medicine, materials, and energy.

What you will do

• Own the model inference service end to end, including API contracts, latency SLAs, throughput guarantees, and rate limits.
• Lead serving architecture decisions involving batching, KV cache, speculative decoding, quantization, and multi-node deployment.
• Establish SLOs for latency, throughput, and availability, along with on-call and postmortem practices.
• Partner with ML, research, and product engineering to make new models production-ready.
• Build model onboarding, deployment safety, evaluation-gate, and observability systems.
• Build, mentor, and retain a high-performing engineering team while owning the serving roadmap.

Requirements

• Deep understanding of the large language model inference stack, including serving frameworks such as vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, and TGI; batching strategies; memory constraints; and latency/throughput tradeoffs.
• Experience owning a customer- or product-facing API service end to end, including SLAs, incident response, and service reliability in fast-moving environments.
• Track record of hiring, mentoring, and retaining senior technical talent and scaling engineering organizations through rapid growth.
• Strong technical judgment across latency, throughput, reliability, cost, and delivery speed.
• Ability to set technical strategy and execute as priorities change.
• Ability to align ML, research, product engineering, and executive stakeholders with competing priorities.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with speculative decoding, quantization such as AWQ, GPTQ, or FP8, or model parallelism strategies.
• Experience with serving evaluation, including output-quality regression testing, A/B routing, and shadow deployments.
• Familiarity with GPU capacity planning, instance provisioning, utilization, and cloud cost modeling.
• Prior work in AI/ML startups or research-heavy organizations.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time U.S. employees receive medical, dental, and vision coverage, employer-paid life and disability insurance, and flexible time off with generous company-wide holidays.
• Benefits include paid parental leave, educational assistance, commuter benefits, bike-share memberships for office-based employees, and a subsidized lunch program.
• Full-time employees outside the U.S. receive a benefits program tailored to their region; international salaries are set to local market.
• Company values include truth, trust, curiosity, grit, and velocity, with startup speed applied to science-focused AI development.