Associate Director / Director, AI Platform, Applied AI

TL;DR

Associate Director / Director, AI Platform, Applied AI (AI): Leading the build of a foundational Applied AI team to fine-tune and adapt models for real-world product use, ensure safe accessibility for diverse customer data, and deliver reliable interfaces. Focus on owning the roadmap from data to deployment, partnering with cross-functional teams, and shipping usable, measurable, and trustworthy AI models.

Location: Cambridge, MA USA; San Francisco, CA USA

Salary: $252,000 – $426,000 USD per year

Company

hirify.global is the world’s first scientific superintelligence platform and autonomous lab for life, chemistry, and materials science, pioneering boundless discovery by applying AI to the scientific method.

What you will do

• Build and lead a high-performing Applied AI team to deliver best-in-class scientific reasoning models for consumer applications.
• Own an end-to-end model customization pipeline to create valuable models from Lila’s base models for high-value use cases.
• Create an integrated evaluation framework for continuous model development and improvement.
• Partner with cross-functional teams to define requirements, deliver customer POCs, and transition successful pilots into scalable products.
• Set technical standards, documentation, and incident response for AI systems in production.
• Recruit, mentor, and grow a diverse team.

Requirements

• 8+ years in applied ML/ML systems with 3+ years leading teams; track record shipping LLM systems to production.
• Deep experience fine-tuning and evaluating large models for customer interaction.
• Production inference expertise: serving frameworks (Triton, vLLM, TGI, Ray, Kubernetes), GPU orchestration, caching, and observability.
• Data privacy and security best practices for multi-tenant systems.

Nice to have

• Experience instruction fine tuning and hillclimbing therein.
• Experience building chat UX, guardrails, tool/function calling, and long-context strategies.
• Knowledge of quantization/distillation, routing/mixture-of-experts, and cost optimization at scale.
• Experience working in compliance-heavy environments (HIPAA, PCI, FedRAMP) and on-prem/VPC deployments.

Culture & Benefits

• Generous early equity along with bonus potential.
• Committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.
• Work in an environment pioneering scientific superintelligence for humankind's greatest challenges.