Director, Applied Research (AI)

Location: Remote; United States of America, New York, New York

Salary: $198,200–$368,000 USD base compensation annually, plus potential annual bonus.

Company

hirify.global provides specialized software, trusted content, and data-driven solutions for legal, tax, accounting, compliance, government, and media professionals.

What you will do

• Lead and develop a high-performing applied science team focused on agentic AI solutions for tax and accounting professionals.
• Design, develop, and deliver AI features that transform customer workflows in high-stakes, accuracy-critical environments.
• Set technical direction for applied research while balancing scientific rigor, customer value, product feasibility, and delivery timelines.
• Partner with product engineering to transition research innovations into scalable, reliable, production-ready capabilities.
• Advise Labs leadership, product leadership, and business stakeholders on AI strategy, partnerships, capability roadmaps, and product direction.
• Advance LLM-based systems, agentic workflows, information retrieval, document understanding, knowledge representation, evaluation, observability, safety, and quality controls while collaborating with tax, audit, and accounting experts.

Requirements

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a closely related field, or a Master's degree with equivalent depth, a strong scientific background, and a relevant publication record.
• 10+ years of hands-on industry experience building AI and machine learning systems for commercial applications; research-only experience is insufficient.
• Recent, direct hands-on experience developing production LLM-based and agentic AI systems for non-trivial use cases.
• 5+ years of experience managing and developing high-performing applied science, machine learning, or AI research teams.
• Demonstrated success in product-facing or customer-facing roles with measurable business and customer impact.
• Technical depth in AI and machine learning sufficient to challenge assumptions, guide technical decisions, and establish research direction.
• Strong expertise in information retrieval and natural language processing, particularly in complex vertical domains.
• Experience with taxonomy induction, document understanding, agentic search, knowledge graphs, neuro-symbolic AI, or comparable approaches for complex knowledge-intensive workflows.
• Experience evaluating AI agents and language-model-based systems, including verifiable rewards, synthetic data generation, and rigorous quality measurement.
• Relevant publications at ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS, ICLR, SIGIR, KDD, or equivalent venues.
• Experience building AI solutions for tax, legal, audit, accounting, or other highly regulated and knowledge-intensive domains.
• Track record of growth and leadership at top-tier technology companies, high-growth startups, or similarly demanding environments.
• Strong communication and influencing skills across applied science, engineering, product, domain expert, and senior business stakeholder groups.
• Commitment to developing people, building strong teams, and creating an inclusive, high-performing culture.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible work arrangements, including work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year.
• Flexible vacation, paid holidays, sick and safe paid time off, parental leave, sabbatical leave, and two company-wide mental health days.
• Health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance; 401(k) with company match; flexible spending and health savings accounts.
• Tuition reimbursement, skills development programs, employee incentive programs, stock purchase opportunities, fitness reimbursement, and wellbeing resources.
• Two paid volunteer days annually, pro-bono consulting opportunities, and ESG initiatives.
• Inclusive culture focused on customer impact, technical excellence, continuous learning, collaboration, and work-life balance.