Applied ML Engineer (Vision-Language Models)

Location

Location: San Francisco, Boston, or Remote (Hybrid)

Company

Spun out of MIT CSAIL, hirify.global builds general-purpose AI systems optimized for deployment across data centers and on-device hardware, partnering with enterprises in consumer electronics, automotive, life sciences, and financial services.

What you will do

• Own enterprise customer vision-language model (VLM) post-training projects end-to-end, from requirements to delivery and evaluation.
• Translate customer needs into multimodal post-training specifications and workflows.
• Design and execute visual data generation, filtering, annotation pipelines, and synthetic data generation for visual tasks.
• Run supervised fine-tuning, preference alignment, and reinforcement learning workflows for VLMs.
• Design task-specific evaluations for visual understanding, grounding, OCR, document parsing, and other multimodal capabilities.
• Feed evaluation results back into core post-training pipelines and contribute to baseline model development.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience with data generation and evaluation for VLM or multimodal post-training
• Experience training or fine-tuning vision-language models using supervised fine-tuning, preference alignment, and/or reinforcement learning
• Strong intuition for visual data quality, annotation design, and multimodal evaluation
• Familiarity with vision encoders, image-text architectures, and interaction with language model backbones
• English: C1 level or higher required

Nice to have

• Experience with visual grounding, document understanding, OCR, or video understanding tasks.
• Experience contributing to shared or general-purpose multimodal post-training infrastructure.
• Prior exposure to customer-facing or applied ML delivery environments.
• Familiarity with alignment or reinforcement learning techniques beyond basic supervised fine-tuning in multimodal settings.

Culture & Benefits

• Real ML work involving fine-tuning vision-language models and generating multimodal data feeding directly into core model development.
• Competitive base salary with equity in a unicorn-stage startup.
• 100% medical, dental, and vision premiums paid for employees and dependents.
• 401(k) matching up to 4% of base pay.
• Unlimited PTO plus company-wide Refill Days throughout the year.