AI Researcher

Location: New York, United States; fully in-office five days a week

Salary: $160,000–$300,000 per year, plus equity and benefits

Company

hirify.global builds AI-powered software maintenance systems that autonomously troubleshoot, remediate, and prevent complex enterprise production incidents.

What you will do

• Prototype and evaluate prompting strategies, reasoning workflows, and tool-use policies for AI agents working with observability data and troubleshooting workflows.
• Build and maintain evaluation harnesses that measure accuracy improvements on real customer incident types.
• Identify failure modes in agent reasoning, design interventions, and ship validated improvements to production.
• Apply fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and reward modeling to align agent behavior with real-world SRE workflows.
• Design synthetic data pipelines for generating incidents and observability signals for training and testing.
• Collaborate with AI engineers, infrastructure teams, and product leads to translate research into product impact.

Requirements

• PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Statistics, or a related technical field.
• Demonstrated depth in LLMs, agents, or applied machine learning, including transformers, reinforcement learning, or neural networks in agentic systems.
• Strong judgment in model evaluation, rigorous experimentation, and experimental iteration.
• Strong software engineering skills and the ability to ship production-quality code in a complex codebase.
• Experience shipping AI or ML systems to production.
• Ability to work in person in New York five days per week.

Nice to have

• Experience in SRE, observability, or backend systems combined with strong AI/ML expertise.
• Experience with RLHF, synthetic data pipelines, or LLM evaluation tooling.
• Contributions to open-source agent frameworks such as LangGraph or DSPy.
• Research experience or publications in LLMs, agents, or reinforcement learning, including venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, or ICLR.
• Startup or early-team experience in ambiguous environments.

Culture & Benefits

• Health insurance and additional benefits.
• Competitive compensation and startup equity.
• Flexible time off.
• Technology setup and in-office snacks.
• Collaborative, high-impact environment focused on building AI-powered infrastructure software.