Applied AI Scientist - LLMs & Voice

Location: Fully remote, with candidates based in the US, UK, Spain, Kenya, Ghana, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, or Burkina Faso. Remote team members are expected to travel to operational markets such as Senegal or Côte d’Ivoire at least once a year, with exceptions.

Salary: $167,00–$227,900 USD, depending on level and location, plus equity.

Company

hirify.global builds affordable mobile money and financial services for millions of customers across West Africa, with the goal of making Africa the first cashless continent.

What you will do

• Drive the quality of automated customer support by evaluating and improving AI systems.
• Bridge research and production by building agent systems that ship into real products.
• Contribute to autonomous voice and digital agents supporting more than 10 million customer interactions per month across West Africa.
• Build solutions for poor connectivity, low literacy, and languages with limited training data.
• Experiment with, evaluate, and integrate the latest voice and text models.
• Own problems end-to-end, from discovery through production, in collaboration with product and engineering leaders.

Requirements

• 5+ years of AI/ML experience.
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs or AI systems, including evaluation, RAG, embeddings, safety, and guardrails.
• Strong foundations in statistics and ML theory.
• Solid Python skills.
• Track record taking AI/ML systems from prototype to production, with attention to reliability, performance, and scalability.
• Fluency with AI agents.
• Fluent English.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity and design AI systems end-to-end without detailed specifications.
• Experience building evaluation frameworks for hallucinations and groundedness, and judging when systems can be trusted.
• Ability to combine research intuition with pragmatic engineering and ship working systems.
• Comfort working with large datasets, complex pipelines, and modern ML infrastructure such as distributed training, feature stores, and monitoring.

Nice to have

• Research background in speech or LLMs.
• Voice AI experience, including ASR, TTS, latency optimization, real-time streaming, or voice agents.
• Experience building customer support or conversational AI systems.
• Ability to translate current speech and LLM research papers into production improvements.
• Familiarity with low-resource language challenges.
• Experience building in high-risk agent environments such as finance.
• Bilingual French proficiency.
• Production deployment experience with AI agents.

Culture & Benefits

• Fully remote work with autonomy and ownership from problem definition through production monitoring.
• $1,200 yearly stipend for coworking meetups with teammates.
• Subsidized health insurance for employees and dependents, plus retirement contributions that vary by country.
• Six months of fully paid parental leave and subsidized fertility assistance.
• Flexible vacation, with most employees taking 21–30 days excluding statutory holidays.
• $10,000 annual charitable donation matching and opportunities to travel to operational markets.

Hiring process

• Apply through the standard application form with an English resume and cover letter.
• An optional JSON resume submission is available, but it is not required.