Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer (AI)

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

Salary: $242,800–$357,000 USD annual base salary, plus potential equity grants.

Company

hirify.global operates delivery and marketing products that connect merchant intent with consumer demand across search and discovery experiences.

What you will do

• Lead the technical direction and long-term vision for AI-first ads and promotions ranking systems.
• Design and build real-time systems for ad selection, ordering, personalization, query understanding, and relevance.
• Apply sequence modeling, deep learning, and large language models to user and merchant representation learning.
• Own the full ML lifecycle, including data analysis, model development, offline evaluation, online A/B testing, monitoring, and iteration.
• Design metrics and experiments to measure quality, business impact, and marketplace trade-offs.
• Partner with engineering, product, analytics, operations, data science, and design teams to move models from prototypes into production.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience building, deploying, and scaling ML and AI models for large-scale, user-facing or data-intensive products.
• Deep expertise in deep learning, large language models, information retrieval, ranking and relevance, recommendation systems, natural language processing, or content understanding.
• Strong programming skills in Python, Java, or C++, with hands-on experience using PyTorch, TensorFlow, or XGBoost.
• Experience across the full ML lifecycle, including feature engineering, iterative development, rigorous offline and online evaluation, monitoring, and improvement.
• Proficiency with AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor throughout software design, development, testing, monitoring, and release.
• Bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to have

• Experience designing and deploying LLM-based systems, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, or generative recommendation systems.
• Experience with large-scale personalization, user modeling, retrieval, ranking, and relevance.
• Open-source contributions, publications, or applied research in ML, NLP, information retrieval, or related areas.

Culture & Benefits

• Opportunity to shape ads relevance across 40+ global markets and new verticals such as Grocery and Retail.
• Comprehensive benefits for regular employees, including medical, dental, vision, disability, and basic life insurance.
• 401(k) plan with employer matching, paid parental leave, family-forming assistance, wellness benefits, and mental health support.
• Flexible paid time off and vacation for salaried roles, plus 80 hours of paid sick time per year.
• Eleven paid holidays and commuter benefits matching.