Principal Data Scientist (AI)

TL;DR

Principal Data Scientist (AI): Driving advanced LLM research and model development for production-grade AI agents, impacting millions of users across various workflows. Focus on owning the full model development lifecycle, from research ideation and training to fine-tuning, evaluation, and production rollout, while also providing technical leadership and mentorship.

Location: Onsite in Palo Alto (CA), Seattle (WA), Bellevue (WA), or San Francisco (CA), USA.

Company

hirify.global's AgentForce Data Science team develops the core Large Language Models (LLMs) that power the company’s production-grade AI agents, directly impacting millions of users.

What you will do

• Own and execute the full model development lifecycle for LLMs, from data preparation to deployment readiness.
• Lead end-to-end research initiatives on LLM training, fine-tuning, alignment, and optimization for production use cases.
• Design, implement, and iterate on reinforcement learning and continuous learning pipelines (e.g., RLHF, RLAIF).
• Conduct rigorous experimentation and analysis to drive measurable model improvements.
• Translate research prototypes into production-grade models meeting latency, scalability, and safety requirements.
• Serve as a technical POC for complex AI projects, aligning across research, engineering, product, and platform teams.

Requirements

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, AI, or a related field.
• Demonstrated hands-on experience owning the full model development lifecycle.
• Deep expertise in large-scale model training and fine-tuning, especially for LLMs.
• Strong background in reinforcement learning, preference learning, or human-in-the-loop learning.
• Experience building and maintaining continuous learning systems.
• Advanced proficiency in Python, with significant hands-on coding experience.
• Deep experience with PyTorch, TensorFlow, or similar deep learning packages.
• Practical experience with modern LLM tooling (Hugging Face, DeepSpeed, Ray, Kubernetes).
• Strong data analysis and experimentation skills.
• Experience mentoring and developing junior researchers or engineers.
• Strong communication skills across all stakeholders.

Nice to have

• Strong publication record in top-tier venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP) or equivalent industry research impact.
• Experience deploying and iterating on models in production, high-availability systems.
• Background in enterprise AI, agentic systems, or LLM platforms at scale.
• Familiarity with trust, safety, or governance frameworks for AI systems.
• Experience with large-scale distributed compute environments (multi-GPU / multi-node training).

Culture & Benefits

• Work on mission-critical LLM systems at massive scale.
• Own models end-to-end, from research to production impact.
• Shape the future of enterprise-grade AI agents.
• Collaborate with world-class researchers and engineers.
• See your research ship, scale, and matter.