Staff AI/ML Engineer

TL;DR

Staff AI/ML Engineer: Building the next generation of learning products with AI at the core with an accent on designing and building agentic AI systems that power consumer learning products. Focus on translating ambiguous product goals into well-defined technical approaches and shipping features end-to-end.

Location: Waterloo, Ontario / Toronto, Ontario

Salary: $171,000 $225,000 CAD

Company

hirify.global is the streaming platform where the world’s best come together so anyone, anywhere, can access and be inspired by their knowledge and stories.

What you will do

• Design and build agentic AI systems that power consumer learning products, including multi-step reasoning, tool use, and orchestration architectures.
• Select and integrate foundation models (LLMs, multimodal) based on product requirements, making pragmatic trade-offs between quality, latency, cost, and safety.
• Build evaluation and observability frameworks that ensure AI product quality at scale, including automated testing, human-in-the-loop review, and production monitoring.
• Architect reliable, production-grade AI pipelines, including prompt management, context retrieval (RAG), caching, and fallback strategies.
• Collaborate with Product, Design, and Engineering to translate ambiguous product goals into well-defined technical approaches and ship features end-to-end.
• Mentor and elevate the AI engineering team by sharing best practices, leading design reviews, and establishing reusable patterns for agentic product development.

Requirements

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years focused on building products with large language models or foundation models.
• Demonstrated experience shipping consumer-facing AI products that use agentic patterns (tool use, multi-step reasoning, orchestration, planning).
• Deep working knowledge of the current foundation model ecosystem: model providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, open-source), prompt engineering, RAG architectures, evaluation frameworks, and orchestration tooling.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: system design, API design, production observability, and the ability to write clean, maintainable code in Python.
• Track record of staying on the cutting edge—you can point to specific ways you’ve incorporated new research, models, or techniques into shipped products.
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills; experience working cross-functionally with product, design, and engineering teams.

Nice to have

• Experience with model fine-tuning or distillation (SFT, DPO, RLHF).
• Background in edtech, consumer media, or content platforms.
• Published research or open-source contributions in AI/ML.
• Experience with multi-agent system design or advanced orchestration frameworks.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote-first workforce with collaborative work spaces in San Francisco and Kitchener, Ontario, and employees in several U.S. states.
• Dynamic, culture-driving company—where learning invaluable skills is all in a day’s work.