Principal Applied Scientist (AI)

TL;DR

Principal Applied Scientist (AI): Leading end-to-end science for grounding next-generation AI applications with an accent on inventing retrieval and attribution methods, defining factuality/faithfulness metrics, and shipping production models and APIs. Focus on co-designing metrics, models, and infrastructure, solving complex concurrency challenges, and ensuring system reliability under heavy traffic for chat assistants, copilots, and autonomous agents.

Location: Onsite in Beijing, China. Employees are expected to work from the office at least four days per week if they live within a 25-mile commute of a designated Microsoft 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, from problem framing to production impact.
• Design and evolve state-of-the-art retrieval and RAG orchestration across various data modalities.
• 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.
• Nurture collaborative relationships with product and business leaders, influencing strategic decisions and driving business impact.
• 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 a related field AND 6+ years of experience (or Master's with 4+ years, or Doctorate with 3+ years).
• 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.
• Solid coding skills and a strong foundation in machine learning, with the ability to implement and optimize models.
• Demonstrated ability to lead through ambiguity, make principled trade-offs, and deliver measurable impact.
• Must be based in Beijing, China, and able to commute to the office at least four days per week.

Nice to have

• Master’s or Doctorate in a related field with additional years of experience.
• Demonstrated expertise in information retrieval, with publications in top-tier conferences or journals.
• Hands-on experience in large language model (LLM) development, including pretraining, SFT, and RL.
• Proven track record in optimizing LLM inference or active contributions to open-source frameworks.

Culture & Benefits

• Join a team that values curiosity, pragmatic rigor, and inclusive collaboration.
• Work with a growth mindset, innovating to empower others and collaborating to achieve shared goals.
• Contribute to a culture of inclusion, respect, integrity, and accountability.
• Opportunity to influence strategic decisions and drive business impact through technology.
• Contribute to ethics and privacy policies, identifying bias and proposing mitigation strategies.