Applied AI Engineer (Defense)

Location: Hybrid; must work on-site at least 2 days per week from the San Francisco office, with 2–4 days preferred. Travel: 10–20%, mostly domestic.

Salary: $150,000–$170,000 base compensation per year, excluding bonuses, equity, and benefits.

Company

hirify.global develops defense and aerospace products powered by Coherent Distributed Networks for warfighters, commercial air operators, and border protection teams.

What you will do

• Build, integrate, evaluate, and deploy AI/ML capabilities across product lines, including inference services and production-facing systems.
• Research data, verify hypotheses, and develop robust, testable, maintainable, and deployable models with product and mission teams.
• Develop production software for data acquisition, processing, model serving, monitoring, lifecycle management, and system integration.
• Evaluate and improve model performance in adversarial GPS-denied environments, with noisy or degraded inputs, and on low-power edge platforms.
• Prototype solutions with mission stakeholders and iterate them toward production-ready implementations.
• Improve AI system reliability through testing, benchmarking, observability, interpretability, failure analysis, and performance optimization.

Requirements

• BS or MS in Computer Science, Engineering, Machine Learning, Applied Mathematics, Physics, or a related technical field.
• At least 2 years of professional software development experience and strong Python skills.
• Experience building, testing, deploying, and supporting production software systems.
• Experience with AI/ML model integration, model serving infrastructure, or model lifecycle management.
• Experience with model evaluation, benchmarking, robustness testing, interpretability, or ML observability.
• Familiarity with APIs, distributed systems, containers, CI/CD, observability, edge deployment environments, and GPU optimization.

Nice to have

• Experience with RF signal processing, image or video processing, computer vision, LLM applications, AI agents, or autonomous systems.
• Experience with drones, robotics, sensor fusion, tracking, or moving-target detection.
• Experience in aerospace, defense, critical infrastructure, robotics, or other mission-critical environments.
• Experience with low-latency inference, hardware-constrained systems, or degraded-connectivity environments.
• Open-source contributions or other technically significant public work.

Culture & Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision benefits fully paid by the company.
• 401(k) with a 50% company match up to 6% of pay, plus FSA, HSA, and life insurance.
• Unlimited PTO, free daily lunch, no-meeting Fridays, and a casual dress code.
• Pre-IPO stock option grants, relocation assistance, and planned annual bonuses.
• A 250-person organization operating across five global offices.