Director / Senior Director, AI x Lab Integration

Location: Cambridge, MA, USA, or San Francisco, CA, USA. Other listed locations: Alewife, Cambridge, MA; San Francisco, CA.

Salary: USD 360,000–570,000 base salary, with bonus potential and early-stage equity.

Company

hirify.global is an early-stage company building AI-driven scientific systems and laboratory instruments to automate the scientific method across medicine, materials, and energy.

What you will do

• Set and lead the AI x Lab Integration research agenda for protocol understanding, intent-to-protocol generation, feasibility assessment, protocol repair, failure diagnosis, and adaptation from experimental results.
• Work with experimental scientists to convert demonstrations, corrections, and feedback into models that capture tacit scientific knowledge.
• Lead research on supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, tool use, and learning from execution feedback for laboratory reasoning.
• Establish independent evaluations covering protocol skills, in-run decisions, cross-domain workflows, scientific correctness, feasibility, execution outcomes, uncertainty, and human intervention.
• Recruit, mentor, and lead scientists and research engineers while setting priorities, ownership, and rigorous experimental standards.
• Partner with domain scientists and laboratory execution, data infrastructure, and orchestration teams.

Requirements

• PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Robotics, Computational Science, or a related field, or equivalent research and leadership experience.
• Substantial experience leading original AI research and translating it into capabilities that work beyond benchmarks.
• Experience developing AI capabilities for automated laboratories, scientific agents, or closed-loop experimentation, with model decisions informed by real experimental results.
• Experience building and leading research teams, including recruiting scientists and engineers, developing technical leaders, and setting priorities under uncertainty.
• Ability to engage deeply with experimental scientists and translate scientific objectives, controls, and failure modes into tractable research problems.
• Hands-on leadership style, including reviewing model behavior, challenging research designs, interpreting failure cases, and guiding technical decisions.

Nice to have

• Expertise in foundation models, post-training, reinforcement learning, agent learning, or related methods.
• Research experience in procedural reasoning, program synthesis, planning, causal reasoning, or uncertainty-aware decision-making.
• Experience learning from expert demonstrations, sparse feedback, or costly real-world experiments.
• Domain expertise in experimental biology, chemistry, materials science, or laboratory automation.
• Influential publications, open-source contributions, or deployed research systems in AI or AI for Science.
• Experience growing a small research team into a program with sustained scientific and operational impact.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time U.S. employees receive medical, dental, vision, life, and disability coverage.
• Flexible time off, company-wide holidays, paid parental leave, educational assistance, commuter benefits, and subsidized lunch for office-based employees.
• Full-time employees outside the U.S. receive benefits tailored to their region; international salaries follow local market rates.
• Startup-speed environment guided by truth, trust, curiosity, grit, and velocity.

Hiring process

• Applications are accepted from candidates; unsolicited agency resumes are not accepted unless the agency is contacted directly by hirify.global’ Talent Acquisition team.