Director, Applied AI & Data Science

Location: Herndon, Virginia, United States; U.S. Person status required

Salary: $182,000–$242,000–$266,200 annually for the Washington, DC metropolitan area; other states use geographic cost-of-labor ranges.

Company

hirify.global develops spatial intelligence capabilities that help decision makers and operators understand current events and shape future outcomes.

What you will do

• Lead, grow, and develop Applied AI Scientists working across geospatial AI, multimodal learning, vision-language models, LLMs, reasoning systems, predictive modeling, and production ML.
• Define and execute the Applied AI Science roadmap, translating customer, market, and mission needs into technical priorities, milestones, and deployable AI capabilities.
• Drive adoption of agentic AI to accelerate research, experimentation, evaluation, documentation, code review, and production support while establishing safe, reliable, and auditable usage standards.
• Oversee near-zero-latency intelligence systems, automated insight generation, self-service intelligence platforms, decision-support tools, and AI-powered workflows.
• Establish standards for experimentation, causal reasoning, model evaluation, benchmark design, A/B testing, human-in-the-loop assessment, and launch readiness.
• Oversee end-to-end ML pipelines and partner with Engineering on deployment, model serving, monitoring, incident response, lifecycle management, scalability, security, reliability, and cost efficiency.

Requirements

• Must be a United States citizen and eligible to obtain a security clearance.
• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Applied Mathematics, Statistics, or a related technical field.
• 10+ years of experience in machine learning, applied AI, data science, AI engineering, decision science, or a related technical discipline, including 5+ years leading technical teams such as applied scientists, ML engineers, AI researchers, or data scientists.
• Demonstrated experience building, deploying, and operating production AI/ML systems with measurable customer, product, operational, or business impact.
• Strong technical depth in several areas including multimodal AI, vision-language models, LLMs, reasoning systems, agentic AI, computer vision, geospatial AI, remote sensing, predictive modeling, causal inference, experimentation, or large-scale ML systems.
• Experience building end-to-end ML systems with data pipelines, training workflows, evaluation frameworks, scalable inference, model monitoring, and retraining.
• Experience defining experimentation standards, model evaluation frameworks, causal inference approaches, or launch-readiness criteria for AI/ML products.
• Strong understanding of cloud-based ML platforms, distributed training, containerized deployment, model serving, dataset versioning, and experiment tracking.

Culture & Benefits

• Outcome-oriented, technically credible, experimentation-driven, operationally disciplined, decisive, customer-oriented, and collaborative working environment.
• Competitive total rewards package with a 401(k) company match, mental health resources, student loan repayment assistance, adoption reimbursement, and pet insurance.
• Position is incentive eligible, with the target based on contribution, company performance, and/or individual results.
• Application window is three days from the posting date and remains open until a qualified candidate is identified.

Hiring process

• Submit an application through hirify.global's Career page.