Member of Technical Staff, Lead Researcher (AI)

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

Salary: $203,500–$299,300 USD annually, plus potential equity grants.

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, where appropriate, production deployment.
• Define research culture and operating practices, including publication standards, collaboration with product teams, and the balance between open and proprietary research.
• Interview, recruit, mentor, and develop researchers, engineers, and fellows.
• 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 systems, open-source work, or research artifacts adopted at scale.
• Experience leading ambitious research projects end-to-end and producing results that others build on.
• Ability to work with real systems and real-world data, not only benchmarks.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills and experience mentoring or developing researchers.
• Interest in hiring, agenda-setting, culture-building, and cross-functional collaboration as part of a founding research team.
• 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 for logistics, long-horizon planning, tool use, multi-agent coordination, or agent evaluation.
• Experience with transfer reinforcement learning, continual learning, foundation models, marketplace forecasting, pricing, matching, or personalization.
• Experience with multimodal systems, robotics, embodied AI, or physical-world data collection.

Culture & Benefits

• Access to proprietary marketplace data, scalable data collection, high compute budgets, and full research infrastructure.
• Support for publication at leading research venues and collaboration with academic researchers, fellows, and visiting researchers.
• Direct access to leadership and autonomy to operate at a principal-level research scope.
• Comprehensive benefits for regular employees, including 401(k) matching, medical, dental, and vision coverage, paid parental leave, paid time off, paid sick leave, and 11 paid holidays.
• Additional wellness, commuter, disability, life insurance, family-forming assistance, and mental health benefits.