Senior Applied Scientist (AI)

TL;DR

Senior Applied Scientist (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 metrics, and shipping production models. Focus on co-designing metrics, models, and infrastructure, ensuring customer impact, privacy, and safety at scale.

Location: Onsite (Beijing, China). Expected to work from the office at least four days per week for employees within a 25-mile commute of the designated office.

Company

hirify.global is building the next-generation Grounding Service that powers the latest AI applications with factual, cited, and trustworthy responses.

What you will do

• Own the science roadmap for grounding, including retrieval, re-ranking, attribution, and reasoning initiatives from problem framing to production.
• Design and evolve state-of-the-art retrieval and RAG orchestration across documents, tables, code, and images.
• Build citation and provenance systems to reduce hallucinations and increase user trust, leading experimentation and evaluation.
• Advance tool-augmented grounding through schema-aware retrieval, function calling, knowledge graph joins, and real-time connectors.
• Partner with platform engineering to productionize models with scalable inference, embedding services, and privacy-compliant systems.
• Mentor applied scientists, establish best practices in experimentation, and contribute to ethics and privacy policies.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 4+ years related experience OR Master’s with 3+ years OR Doctorate with 1+ year.
• Minimum of 4 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, with the ability to implement and optimize models effectively.
• Demonstrated ability to lead through ambiguity, make principled trade-offs, and deliver measurable impact in cross-functional, fast-paced settings.
• Work Format: Expected to work from the office at least four days per week if living within a 25-mile commute of a non-U.S. Microsoft office.

Nice to have

• Master’s Degree in a related field AND 6+ years experience OR Doctorate with 3+ years.
• Demonstrated expertise in information retrieval, with publications in top-tier conferences or journals.
• Hands-on experience in large language model (LLM) development, including pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning.
• Proven track record in optimizing LLM inference, or active contributions to open-source frameworks like vLLM or SGLang.

Culture & Benefits

• A team that values curiosity, pragmatic rigor, and inclusive collaboration.
• Belief that great systems emerge when scientists and engineers co-design metrics, models, and infrastructure.
• Obsession over customer impact, privacy, and safety.
• Growth mindset, innovation to empower others, and collaboration to realize shared goals.
• Values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion.