Lead AI Scientist (LLM)

Location: Hybrid role requiring work from the Palo Alto office 2–3 days per week

Salary: $220,000–$260,000 annually for the Bay Area, plus equity and benefits

Company

hirify.global builds an AI Observability platform that helps organizations monitor, evaluate, secure, analyze, and improve AI applications.

What you will do

• Lead applied research and development for models and datasets supporting the Trust Service, guardrail classifiers, and evaluators.
• Design, train, and deploy production classifiers for prompt injection, jailbreaks, PII, hallucination, faithfulness, safety, security, and quality detection.
• Develop synthetic and adversarial dataset pipelines for generating, filtering, and validating failure-mode data.
• Drive the technical direction of LLM- and agent-powered generative insights for diagnosing AI application issues.
• Contribute to evaluation infrastructure for measuring model quality, regression, and drift.
• Collaborate with Backend, Platform, Product, Solutions Engineering, and Customer Success teams; mentor AI Scientists and help scale research prototypes into observable production services.

Requirements

• 7+ years of applied AI experience and a strong record of taking models from research to production.
• Experience with LLM or agentic evaluations and guardrailing.
• Expertise in training and fine-tuning classifier models, including BERT-family architectures and LLM-as-classifier approaches.
• Hands-on experience with dataset sourcing, labeling, synthetic generation, adversarial augmentation, and quality control.
• Proficiency in Python and the modern ML stack, including PyTorch, Hugging Face, and training or serving frameworks.
• Production experience with real-time inference, monitoring, rollout, and collaboration with backend and platform engineers.

Nice to have

• M.S. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Physics, or a related quantitative field.
• Research publications at major ML or NLP venues.
• Experience with reinforcement learning, RLHF, RLAIF, preference-based fine-tuning, or synthetic data generation at scale.
• Background in AI safety, red-teaming, adversarial ML, or regulated enterprise industries.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative hybrid AI Science team with knowledge sharing, peer learning, and collective problem solving.
• Competitive pay, equity, premium health, dental, and vision coverage, and a 401(k) plan.
• Open PTO, paid parental leave, and monthly fitness reimbursement.
• Team events, company offsites, and professional collaboration across engineering, product, and customer teams.
• Palo Alto office benefits include an annual Caltrain pass, Fastrak reimbursement, weekday lunch, massages, snacks, and drinks.