Applied Scientist 2 (AI, NLP, LLMs)

TL;DR

Applied Scientist 2 (AI): Building the next-generation Grounding Service for AI applications like chat assistants and copilots with an accent on inventing retrieval and attribution methods, defining factuality/faithfulness metrics, and shipping production models. Focus on designing and evolving state-of-the-art retrieval and RAG orchestration, building citation and provenance systems, and advancing tool-augmented grounding through schema-aware retrieval and function calling.

Location: Hybrid, must be based within a 25-mile commute of a Microsoft office in Beijing, China, and work from office at least four days per week.

Company

hirify.global is empowering individuals and organizations by building next-generation AI applications such as chat assistants, copilots, and autonomous agents with factual, cited, and trustworthy responses.

What you will do

• Own the science roadmap for grounding, driving initiatives from problem framing to production impact.
• Design and evolve state-of-the-art retrieval and RAG orchestration across diverse data types.
• Build citation and provenance systems to reduce hallucinations and increase user trust.
• Advance tool-augmented grounding through schema-aware retrieval, function calling, and real-time connectors.
• Partner with platform engineering to productionize models with scalable inference and privacy-compliant systems.
• Mentor applied scientists and data scientists, establishing best practices in experimentation and error analysis.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 2+ years of experience, or Master’s with 1+ year, or Doctorate.
• Minimum of 2 years of hands-on experience designing and building search, retrieval, or ranking systems.
• Proven track record of shipping LLM-powered or Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems into production environments.
• Solid coding skills and a strong foundation in machine learning.
• Demonstrated ability to lead through ambiguity, make principled trade-offs, and deliver measurable impact in cross-functional settings.
• English: B2 required.

Nice to have

• Bachelor’s Degree with 5+ years, Master’s with 3+ years, or Doctorate with 1+ year of experience.
• Minimum of 4 years of hands-on experience in search, retrieval, or ranking systems.
• Demonstrated expertise in information retrieval, with publications in top-tier conferences or journals.
• Hands-on experience in large language model development, including pretraining, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and reinforcement learning (RL).
• Proven track record in optimizing LLM inference or active contributions to open-source frameworks like vLLM, SGLang, or related projects.

Culture & Benefits

• Team values curiosity, pragmatic rigor, and inclusive collaboration.
• Scientists and engineers co-design metrics, models, and infrastructure.
• Obsession over customer impact, privacy, and safety.
• Growth mindset, innovation, and collaboration to achieve shared goals.
• Culture of inclusion, respect, integrity, and accountability.

Hiring process

• Applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.
• Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer.
• Assistance with religious and/or disability accommodations available during the application process.