Principal AI/ML Research Engineer (Fintech)

Location: United States; the role can be based in Seattle, WA; Portland, ME; Boston, MA; or Chicago, IL. The reporting VP is located in the San Jose, CA Bay Area.

Company

hirify.global is a global commerce platform and payments technology company helping businesses manage employee benefits, fleets, and payments.

What you will do

• Design self-supervised pre-training and fine-tuning strategies for payment histories, transaction streams, and behavioral data.
• Lead research and prototyping of Payment Foundation Models, Tabular Transformers, LLMs, RAG systems, multimodal models, and reinforcement learning solutions.
• Develop frameworks for AI-agent feedback, self-learning, self-improvement, and evaluation.
• Optimize AI models for performance, latency, and cost, including model-routing solutions.
• Build rigorous benchmarking, validation, explainability, fairness, and bias-reduction methodologies.
• Define the AI research roadmap and mentor engineers and data scientists while collaborating with Data Engineering, Product, Security, Risk, Compliance, and ML Engineering.

Requirements

• 12+ years of software or ML engineering experience, including 5+ years in applied AI/ML research, model architecture, novel algorithm development, AI applications, or AI-agent development.
• Deep expertise in Transformer architectures, self-attention, and self-supervised learning for sequential, time-series, tabular, financial, or transactional data.
• Strong knowledge of deep learning, LLM pre-training and fine-tuning, LoRA, PEFT, RAG, prompt engineering, diffusion, reinforcement learning, supervised and unsupervised learning, anomaly detection, and graph algorithms.
• Expert Python skills and experience with PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX, plus distributed AI frameworks such as Ray, DeepSpeed, Megatron, or Spark.
• Hands-on experience with AWS or Azure and ML platforms or vector databases such as SageMaker, MLflow, Databricks, LanceDB, Pinecone, Qdrant, or Milvus.
• Master’s or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Mathematics, or a related quantitative field is preferred; strong communication and technical leadership skills are required.

Nice to have

• Experience with C++ or Java for performance-critical ML components.
• Publications in leading AI/ML venues or meaningful open-source contributions.
• Experience in payments, fintech, risk management, fraud detection, or transactional big data.

Culture & Benefits

• Work in a fast-paced environment focused on continuous innovation and client service.
• Collaborate across technical, product, risk, security, compliance, and business teams.
• Contribute to responsible AI practices covering fairness, safety, explainability, privacy, and regulatory compliance.
• Receive comprehensive, market-competitive benefits supporting personal and professional well-being.
• Join an organization with more than 6,500 employees serving businesses in over 200 countries and territories.