Senior Applied Machine Learning Scientist

Location: DC-Washington-TWP Headquarters; on-site five days a week

Salary: $131,500–$219,100 annually

Company

hirify.global is a news organization developing journalism, digital products, and AI-powered reader experiences.

What you will do

• Lead applied research and development across generative AI, search, retrieval, ranking, content understanding, and recommendation.
• Translate ambiguous product and business challenges into scientific problems with clear metrics, experiments, and success criteria.
• Design, train, evaluate, and deploy LLMs, VLMs, embedding systems, learning-to-rank models, and agentic workflows.
• Build AI-powered experiences including Ask The Post, semantic search, question answering, intelligent discovery, and conversational search.
• Design offline and online evaluations, including relevance metrics, retrieval quality, A/B testing, and causal analysis.
• Develop scalable production ML systems and collaborate with scientists, engineers, data teams, product managers, editors, and business stakeholders while mentoring junior staff.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Machine Learning, or a related technical field.
• 4+ years of experience in applied machine learning, AI, data science, information retrieval, NLP, recommender systems, or a related field.
• Strong Python experience and proficiency with at least one ML framework such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX.
• Experience designing, evaluating, and deploying ML models with large-scale datasets.
• Strong foundations in machine learning, statistical analysis, experimental design, and model evaluation.
• Experience with search, ranking, retrieval, NLP, generative AI, or recommendation systems.

Nice to have

• Master’s or Ph.D. in a related technical field.
• Experience with transformer models, embeddings, two-tower architectures, LLMs, VLMs, semantic search, RAG, question answering, or recommendation systems.
• Experience with AWS, GCP, Spark, Beam, BigQuery, or similar cloud and big-data technologies.
• Background in model evaluation, calibration, uncertainty estimation, interpretability, responsible AI, deep learning, reinforcement learning, causal inference, or learning-to-rank.
• Publications, patents, open-source contributions, technical talks, or experience mentoring technical staff.

Culture & Benefits

• Work in an investigative journalism environment focused on innovation and impactful storytelling.
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage, plus a company-paid pension and 401(k) match.
• Three weeks of vacation, up to three weeks of paid sick leave, nine paid holidays, and two personal days.
• 20 weeks of paid parental leave, mental health resources, backup care, and caregiver concierge services.
• Gender-affirming services, pet insurance, a free Post digital subscription, and leadership and career development programs.