Lead Data Scientist, AI Labs

Location: Hybrid, with required office attendance two to three days per week in Washington, D.C. or New York City, United States

Salary: $164,000–$201,000 USD annually, plus benefits

Company

hirify.global is a mission-driven multimedia organization producing news, information, and music programming in partnership with independent public radio stations.

What you will do

• Lead the selection, fine-tuning, optimization, and evaluation of open-source and proprietary large language models for hirify.global content.
• Design automated machine learning pipelines that transform audio, transcripts, and text into semantic metadata.
• Architect recommendation, personalization, audience segmentation, and lifecycle-retention systems using enriched content metadata.
• Build self-service data pipelines and audience analytics models in BigQuery.
• Develop API-driven newsroom tools, secure database search models, and production data science workflows.
• Establish model testing, benchmarking, privacy, security, and bias-mitigation frameworks for responsible AI deployment.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional experience in data science, machine learning, or NLP delivering production-grade systems.
• Experience applying, fine-tuning, and evaluating LLMs; designing recommendation systems, semantic search pipelines, vector databases, and large-scale data architectures.
• Experience with ASR, diarization, audio preprocessing, unstructured multimedia, or speech-to-text workflows.
• Hands-on experience with Python, SQL, ML and agentic engineering frameworks, vector search, RAG, prompt engineering, and API integration.
• Experience deploying and optimizing ML workflows in Azure, AWS, or GCP, including cloud data warehouses such as BigQuery or Snowflake.
• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or Machine Learning; PhD preferred, with strong knowledge of algorithmic ethics, privacy, and bias mitigation.

Nice to have

• Experience in a media organization, digital newsroom, or public service institution.
• Experience integrating automated LLM evaluation gates and regression testing into CI/CD pipelines.

Culture & Benefits

• Mission-driven work focused on journalism, public media, information, creativity, and social responsibility.
• Collaborative and inclusive workplace with diverse voices and cross-disciplinary partnerships.
• Health and wellness benefits, paid time off, and financial well-being programs.
• Medical, dental, vision, life, disability, and voluntary retirement savings plan options for eligible full-time employees.