Principal Data Scientist (AI)

TL;DR

Principal Data Scientist (AI/RAG): Defining the technical direction for evaluation and scaling of chat quality across an agentic platform with an accent on RAG, retrieval, and tool-selection policies. Focus on designing quality metrics, optimizing retrieval/re-ranking approaches, and productionizing evaluation pipelines for LLM-powered systems.

Location: Distributed; must be based in the UK, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, or Sweden

Company

hirify.global is the Search AI Company, providing cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability used by over 50% of the Fortune 500.

What you will do

• Define evaluation strategies for conversational and agentic search, including offline/online metrics, golden datasets, and LLM-as-judge calibration.
• Lead the design of quality metrics and decision frameworks for RAG, model selection, agent routing, and cost/latency trade-offs.
• Improve retrieval and re-ranking approaches, focusing on sparse/dense retrieval, vector search, and semantic rewrites.
• Partner with engineering to productionize evaluation pipelines, telemetry, dashboards, and CI guardrails.
• Influence the product roadmap by identifying high-leverage quality gaps and proposing practical technical solutions.
• Mentor other data scientists and engineers in experiment design and statistical rigor for LLM-powered systems.

Requirements

• 8+ years of applied DS/ML experience in IR, NLP, ranking, semantic search, or RAG.
• Proven track record of leading evaluation for production AI/ML systems, including groundedness and citation quality.
• Proficiency in Python, PyTorch/Transformers, Pandas, and creating reproducible experiments.
• Deep understanding of retrieval systems and metrics such as nDCG, MRR, and Recall@k.
• Practical experience with hirify.globalsearch or similar distributed data systems.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills for explaining technical trade-offs to leadership.

Culture & Benefits

• Distributed company culture with flexible locations and schedules.
• Competitive pay and comprehensive health coverage for employees and their families.
• Generous annual vacation allowance.
• Company matching for financial donations up to $2000 and 40 hours of paid volunteer time per year.
• Parental leave with a minimum of 16 weeks.