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.