Member of Technical Staff, Lead Researcher (AI)

TL;DR

Member of Technical Staff, Lead Researcher (AI): Building a founding AI Research organization and developing publishable, deployable systems for logistics and local commerce with an accent on agentic systems, foundation models, reinforcement learning, multimodal understanding, and embodied AI. Focus on setting the research agenda, leading frontier-scale projects from problem framing through production deployment, and shaping research culture, infrastructure, and collaboration.

Location: San Francisco, CA or Sunnyvale, CA, United States

Salary: $203,500–$299,300 USD per year, plus equity opportunities

Company

hirify.global operates a large-scale, multi-sided local-commerce marketplace connecting consumers, merchants, and delivery workers.

What you will do

• Set the research agenda for one or more areas of hirify.global AI Research.
• Lead high-impact research projects from problem framing through publication and production deployment.
• Build the research organization by interviewing, recruiting, and mentoring researchers, engineers, and fellows.
• Shape publication practices, collaboration models, and the balance between open and proprietary research.
• Partner with ML platform, product, and operations teams to identify high-leverage research opportunities and translate findings into real-world impact.

Requirements

• Strong research track record, including first-author publications at top ML venues or equivalent large-scale research output.
• Experience leading ambitious research projects end-to-end and producing results adopted by others.
• Ability to identify valuable research problems, evaluate approaches, and exercise strong technical judgment.
• Experience working close to real systems and real-world data, with an interest in deploying frontier systems to production.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with experience mentoring or developing researchers.
• A PhD in a relevant field is typical but not required; demonstrated research output and judgment are prioritized.

Nice to have

• Experience with agentic systems, long-horizon planning, tool use, or multi-agent coordination.
• Experience with continual learning, foundation models, evaluation, multimodal AI, robotics, or embodied AI.
• Experience publishing at venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, RSS, CoRL, or KDD.

Culture & Benefits

• Access to proprietary marketplace data, large compute budgets, RL infrastructure, evaluation pipelines, and operational-scale data collection.
• Support for publication at leading research venues and collaboration with academic researchers and fellows.
• Direct access to leadership and autonomy comparable to a principal-level researcher.
• Regular employees receive equity opportunities, 401(k) matching, paid parental leave, paid time off, sick leave, and medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Additional benefits include wellness, commuter, disability, life insurance, family-forming assistance, and mental health programs.

Hiring process

• Qualifications are evaluated with support from Gem, an automated recruitment tool, with final decisions made through meaningful human review.