Staff Software Engineer, Machine Learning (AI)

TL;DR

Staff Software Engineer, Machine Learning (AI): Leading and executing cross-cutting machine learning initiatives across multiple domains like Recommendations, Trust & Safety, Profile, Chat, Growth, and Revenue optimization with an accent on API design, database performance, and scalability. Focus on diagnosing and unblocking complex projects, shaping technical strategy, and mentoring senior engineers within hirify.global's ML organization.

Location: Hybrid role in Palo Alto, California, requiring in-office collaboration three days per week.

Salary: $265,000–$280,000 a year

Company

hirify.global is a leading global dating app that revolutionized how people meet, serving approximately 50 million users monthly across 190 countries.

What you will do

• Lead and execute cross-cutting ML initiatives across multiple domains with unclear ownership.
• Partner with the Director of Engineering to identify opportunities and set technical direction for the ML team.
• Diagnose and unblock complex or struggling projects through hands-on technical leadership.
• Embed with individual pods to provide deep technical support and elevate ML system quality.
• Act as a strategic thought partner to engineering managers, shaping strategy and identifying risks.
• Collaborate with domain tech leads to align architectures, data pipelines, and modeling approaches.
• Influence technical direction and best practices across the ML organization through design and code reviews.
• Mentor senior engineers and help develop technical leadership across the team.

Requirements

• BS/MS in Computer Science or equivalent with 8+ years of experience designing, building, and shipping production machine learning systems at scale.
• At least two peer-reviewed publications in top-tier conferences or journals (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, KDD, WWW, ACL, CVPR).
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly.
• Professional work experience in Recommendation Systems or Causal Inference (Revenue or Growth).
• Strong hands-on engineering skills to write, review, and debug production-quality code and ML pipelines.
• Proven track record as a senior individual contributor (Staff or Principal level) in translating complex, ambiguous business problems into Machine Learning problems.
• Deep understanding of end-to-end ML systems, including data pipelines, modeling, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring.
• Experience partnering closely with engineering managers and senior stakeholders to lead cross-team initiatives.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Triton Inference Server, Ray Serve, Airflow, Flink, or Spark (Databricks) in production environments.

Culture & Benefits

• Strive to build a workplace that reflects the rich diversity of our members around the world.
• Value unique perspectives and backgrounds.
• Proud to be an equal opportunity workplace.
• Welcome people of all sexes, gender identities, races, ethnicities, disabilities, and other lived experiences.
• Offer reasonable accommodation to complete a job application or participate in the hiring process if needed.