Senior Applied AI Engineer (AI)

TL;DR

Senior Applied AI Engineer (AI): Designing and operating production retrieval and semantic systems for AI-native capabilities across the platform with an accent on vector store operation, indexing pipelines, and retrieval quality evaluation. Focus on building scalable retrieval infrastructure, implementing semantic patterns, and ensuring system reliability and relevance at scale.

Location: Hybrid in Budapest, Hungary

Compensation: HUF 1.5M – HUF 2M

Company

hirify.global creates intuitive products that simplify learning and personal development through an AI-native platform.

What you will do

• Design and ship production retrieval systems that power AI product capabilities.
• Manage vector store selection, including scalability, latency, reliability, and multi-tenant design.
• Build indexing and refresh pipelines covering chunking, embedding generation, and versioned indices.
• Implement semantic retrieval patterns, including similarity search, metadata filtering, and reranking.
• Define and execute retrieval evaluation using gold sets, offline metrics, and regression gates.
• Partner with platform engineers on CI/CD, monitoring, and incident readiness.

Requirements

• 6+ years of experience building and shipping production ML or applied AI systems.
• Proven experience owning a retrieval system in production, including vector store operation.
• Strong Python engineering skills and experience building services/APIs with FastAPI or similar.
• Hands-on experience with embeddings, approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search, and ranking systems.
• Experience designing indexing and refresh strategies with data quality controls.
• Must be based in or able to work in a hybrid model in Budapest, Hungary.

Nice to have

• Experience with hybrid retrieval (lexical plus vector) or learning-to-rank.
• Experience with graph-structured context systems or knowledge graph integration.
• Experience building evaluation and observability for LLM or retrieval systems.
• Experience with AWS-native architectures for retrieval and indexing services.
• Experience in education technology, content, or curriculum modeling.

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive compensation and employee ownership program.
• Flexible work culture with hybrid collaboration spaces.
• Generous time off, including the annual “Dim the Lights” recharge period in late December.
• Comprehensive wellness programs and mental health support.
• Learning and development resources, including professional tools and tuition reimbursement.
• Inclusive environment with mentorship, hack weeks, and internal conferences.