Director of Applied Research (Information Retrieval)

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

Base compensation: $198,200–$368,000 USD annually; the role may also be eligible for an annual bonus.

Company

hirify.global provides trusted content, specialized software, data, intelligence, and technology for legal, tax, accounting, compliance, government, and media professionals.

What you will do

• Set the technical strategy for information retrieval, search, ranking, semantic search, RAG, agentic retrieval, knowledge graphs, and retrieval evaluation.
• Build, mentor, and manage teams spanning AI research, machine learning engineering, cloud engineering, and data engineering.
• Lead enterprise-grade retrieval, NLP, ranking, and knowledge-based AI solutions from experimentation through production deployment.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to translate customer problems in legal, tax, news, and corporate domains into scalable AI applications.
• Establish research-to-production practices covering automation, monitoring, MLOps, cloud-native deployment, and operational excellence.
• Influence AI investment decisions, product roadmaps, modernization initiatives, and alignment across research, engineering, and product leadership.

Requirements

• PhD in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, or a closely related field.
• 8+ years of industry experience building and deploying production AI systems at scale.
• Proven success taking machine learning and AI research into production-grade software with measurable business impact.
• Strong publication record in venues such as SIGIR, NeurIPS, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, KDD, WWW, or comparable conferences.
• Experience building, mentoring, and managing high-performing engineering and scientific teams, leading cross-functional initiatives, and influencing technical strategy.
• Exceptional communication, collaboration, stakeholder management, independent decision-making, and entrepreneurial skills.
• Deep hands-on expertise in several areas including semantic search, ranking, retrieval optimization, search relevance, RAG, agentic retrieval, NLP, LLMs, generative AI, knowledge graphs, and knowledge systems.
• Production AI experience with Python, PyTorch, Hugging Face, MLOps, and AWS, Azure, or equivalent cloud platforms.
• Understanding of SDLC and hands-on programming experience with Python, Java, TypeScript, or JavaScript; ability to translate between research and engineering methodologies.
• Product mindset, customer focus, comfort with ambiguity, continuous learning, and ability to work in diverse, agile, interdisciplinary environments.

Nice to have

• Experience building enterprise search, discovery, or research-assistance platforms.
• Experience in Legal, Tax & Accounting, Risk, Financial Services, or other complex professional domains.
• Experience with hybrid search, vector databases, recommendation systems, and large-scale retrieval platforms.
• Experience with Azure ML, Azure AI Foundry, AWS SageMaker, or similar cloud platforms.
• Experience leading large-scale AI initiatives and geographically distributed teams.
• Familiarity with MLOps frameworks, containerization, and modern DevOps practices for AI systems.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote work with flexible arrangements, including work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year.
• Flexible vacation, two company-wide mental health days, paid holidays, sick and safe time off, parental leave, and sabbatical leave.
• Health, dental, vision, disability, life insurance, 401(k) with company match, Flexible Spending and Health Savings Accounts, and wellbeing resources.
• Tuition reimbursement, skills development programs, employee incentive programs, Employee Stock Purchase Plan, and access to Headspace.
• Two paid volunteer days annually and opportunities for pro-bono consulting and ESG initiatives.
• Inclusive, collaborative culture focused on customer impact, continuous learning, innovation, and work-life balance.