Principal Research Scientist (AI)

Location: United Kingdom. Candidates must already have the legal right to work in the UK; visa sponsorship is not available. Relocation support and U.S. visa support may be available for a future move to the San Francisco Bay Area, subject to business needs and work authorization requirements.

Base salary: £140,000–£200,000 per year, plus equity and benefits.

Company

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

What you will do

• Research and develop foundation models, new architectures, reinforcement learning, reward modeling, and scaling methods.
• Build evaluation benchmarks, evaluation loops, quality measurement systems, and failure-analysis approaches.
• Investigate frontier areas including multimodal models, agents, tool use, test-time compute, and world models.
• Take ownership of the full research cycle: frame questions, design experiments, write papers, and ship results.
• Develop research that improves realtime AI products and inference systems serving high-volume workloads.

Requirements

• Existing legal right to work in the United Kingdom is required.
• Experience with foundation models, evaluation, frontier AI topics, or equivalent practical work.
• Evidence of substantial AI work through research, production systems, side projects, competitions, collaborations, or open-source contributions.
• Ability to work independently on ambiguous problems and turn research findings into shipped systems.
• PhD in machine learning or NLP, or equivalent practical experience, is useful but not mandatory.

Nice to have

• Published research at ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, EMNLP, ACL, or AAAI.
• Experience with multimodal models, agents, tool use, test-time compute, or world models.
• Public non-trivial AI projects, interdisciplinary experiments, or open-source contributions.

Culture & Benefits

• Flat structure, fast iterations, and minimal process overhead.
• Research impact is prioritized while support is provided for sharing work that advances the field.
• Equity and benefits are included in addition to base salary.
• Work is organized around clarifying ambiguous problems, designing experiments, and delivering visible results.

Hiring process

• No cover letter is required; applicants are encouraged to provide a link to something they have built.