Head of Research (AI)

Location: In person in Central London, 4–5 days in the office

Company

hirify.global develops AI agents for financial crime intelligence, automating manual review tasks for financial institutions and improving AML review efficiency.

What you will do

• Define and own the AI research strategy and roadmap, including build-versus-adapt decisions for frontier models, bespoke models, fine-tuning, distillation, and APIs.
• Build, lead, hire, develop, and retain the research team while setting rigorous operating practices and accountable ownership.
• Own model quality through benchmarks, backtests, regression suites, evaluation methodology, documentation, and validation practices.
• Train, fine-tune, evaluate, and deploy LLMs, vision models, and agentic systems for document fraud detection, entity screening, and web-scale due diligence.
• Build continuous-improvement loops using human feedback for dataset curation, fine-tuning, distillation, and measurable model improvements.
• Partner with product, engineering, and commercial teams to bring research into production and represent the research externally through publications, talks, and industry engagement.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in applied AI research or ML engineering, including leading teams and owning a research agenda through production.
• Hands-on expertise training and fine-tuning LLMs and vision models, building and testing agentic systems, and designing production-grade evaluations.
• Strong research judgment, including the ability to distinguish promising methods from merely new ones and prioritize research against customer impact.
• Strong understanding of applying AI to real-world problems and connecting model behavior to customer outcomes in AML, compliance, and risk.
• Clear, concise communication skills for explaining complex AI concepts to executives, customers, and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to align researchers, engineers, and commercial teams around a shared plan and take full responsibility for outcomes and decisions.

Nice to have

• PhD in machine learning, AI, or a related field.
• Experience with distillation, RL-based post-training, or inference optimization.
• Experience using TypeScript.
• Experience in regulated industries.

Culture & Benefits

• Early-stage startup environment with significant ownership and influence over AI strategy.
• Work on applied AI problems where accuracy, explainability, and trust are essential.
• Culture centered on urgency, excellence, proactive ownership, strategic thinking, and resourceful experimentation.
• Work from anywhere in the world for 4 weeks per year, in addition to regular team off-sites.
• Competitive salary and equity package, bi-annual salary reviews, and yearly performance-based equity refreshes.

Hiring process

• Apply for the Head of Research role; the company explicitly states that visa sponsorship is available.