Senior Applied Scientist (AI)

TL;DR

Senior Applied Scientist (AI): Leading the science behind Discover's ranking and content-quality stack, combining LLMs, multimodal models, and large-scale recommender systems to drive engagement, satisfaction, and trust. Focus on designing and deploying models for content quality understanding, advancing recommendation and ranking stacks, and ensuring safety and trust in AI systems.

Location: Vancouver, Canada. This is a hybrid role requiring employees to work from the office at least four days per week if living within a 25-mile commute of a designated Microsoft office.

Salary: CAD $114,400 – $203,900 per year

Company

hirify.global helps hundreds of millions of people be informed, entertained, and inspired by surfacing highly relevant, trustworthy, and delightful content across Microsoft surfaces.

What you will do

• Lead content-quality understanding by designing and deploying models assessing credibility, usefulness, freshness, safety, and diversity.
• Advance the recommendation & ranking stack by architecting and productionizing large-scale DNN/LLM-enhanced recommenders.
• Define offline metrics and online methodologies to confidently attribute impact and guard against regressions.
• Partner with policy and platform teams to encode safety standards into the ML system.
• Collaborate with engineering on data contracts, feature stores, distributed training/inference, and automated rollout.
• Mentor peers and provide technical leadership across problem framing and methodology selection.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 4+ years related experience OR Master’s Degree AND 3+ years OR Doctorate AND 1+ year related experience.
• 2+ years of experience working with LLM, NLU or content-quality/safety models at consumer scale, with clear business impact.

Nice to have

• Publications at top AI/ML conferences (e.g., KDD, SIGIR, EMNLP, NIPS, ICML, ICLR, RecSys, ACL, CIKM, CVPR, ICCV, etc.).
• Expertise with LLMs (prompting, RAG, Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning) and multimodal modeling.
• Experience building content integrity/safety systems and quality-aware ranking.
• Familiarity with Microsoft stack (e.g., Azure ML, Kusto, Synapse, Azure AI Foundry).
• 2+ years of experience in Python and at least one major deep learning framework (PyTorch/TensorFlow).
• 2+ years of evaluation & experimentation and ML model development lifecycle.

Culture & Benefits

• Come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize shared goals.
• Benefit from a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond, built on values of respect, integrity, and accountability.
• Find additional pay information and details on equal opportunity employment.