Principal Engineer (AI)

TL;DR

Principal Engineer (AI): Building and scaling multimodal agent systems from prototype to production with an accent on system architecture, reliability, and performance. Focus on bridging the gap between frontier research and robust, instrumented production infrastructure.

Location: Must be based in the USA (San Francisco, CA)

Compensation: $255,000–$345,000 per year

Company

hirify.global AGI Lab is a research-focused team combining startup-like agility with the scale and resources of hirify.global to build autonomous agents capable of real-world task completion.

What you will do

• Set the technical direction for the team and influence the broader AGI organization.
• Partner with researchers to transition VLM and agent prototypes into robust, scalable systems.
• Develop tooling to accelerate research and engineering velocity.
• Drive technical design reviews, mentor senior engineers, and ensure operational excellence.
• Identify reusable primitives and create foundational systems for other teams.
• Represent the lab externally through research publications, conference talks, and open-source contributions.

Requirements

• Must be based in the USA with authorization to work.
• Master’s degree and 6+ years of engineering experience.
• Strong proficiency in Python and at least one systems language (C++, Rust, or Go).
• Experience designing and operating large-scale software, ML systems, or distributed infrastructure.
• Proven track record of leading ambiguous, cross-functional technical projects from definition to delivery.
• Strong communication skills to align stakeholders and drive technical decisions.

Nice to have

• Experience with video understanding and vision-language models.
• Expertise in ML engineering, including distributed training, data pipelines, and observability.
• Knowledge of search, ranking, vector databases, and large-scale multimodal indexing.
• Experience with infrastructure tools like Kubernetes, Ray, Spark, or Kafka.

Culture & Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, financial, and other benefits package.
• Equity and sign-on payments provided as part of total compensation.
• Inclusive culture with support for workplace accommodations.
• Opportunity to work on high-risk, high-payoff frontier research.