Senior / Lead Research Scientist (AI)

Location: Germany. Future relocation to the San Francisco Bay Area may be supported with full U.S. visa and relocation assistance, subject to business needs and work authorization requirements.

Company

hirify.global is a research lab and inference provider building realtime AI systems, speech models, LLM-serving infrastructure, and modular APIs for high-volume consumer applications.

What you will do

• Define and investigate open-ended research questions across foundation models, agents, multimodal systems, and realtime AI.
• Design and run experiments involving model architectures, reinforcement learning, reward modeling, scaling, and test-time compute.
• Build benchmarks, evaluation loops, quality measurement systems, and failure-analysis processes.
• Develop research from initial hypothesis through experiments, written findings, and production deployment.
• Collaborate with U.S.-based leadership and engineering teams to ship research into high-volume inference systems and APIs.

Requirements

• Strong practical experience in enough of the relevant areas to demonstrate research ability and impact.
• Experience with foundation models, evaluation, frontier AI topics, or related machine learning research.
• Evidence of full-cycle research ownership, including framing questions, running experiments, writing results, and shipping outcomes.
• Published research at venues such as ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, EMNLP, ACL, or AAAI, or equivalent practical work.
• PhD in machine learning or natural language processing, or equivalent practical experience.
• Professional fluency in written and spoken English is required.

Nice to have

• Non-trivial AI side projects, interdisciplinary experiments, open-source contributions, competitions, or other public work.
• Experience with LLM-as-judge systems, world models, tool use, or agentic systems.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on unclear problems with autonomy to define the direction and design the experiment.
• Evaluation is treated as a first-class research product, with impact prioritized over publication volume.
• Flat structure, fast iterations, and minimal process overhead.
• Opportunities to share work that advances the field.
• Potential U.S. visa and relocation support for candidates relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area, subject to business needs and legal requirements.

Hiring process

• No cover letter is required; examples or links to work you have built are valued.