Senior Software Development Engineer (Advertising Technology AI/ML)

Location: Chicago, Illinois, United States only; employees must be in the office at least three days per week. Relocation assistance is not available.

Salary: $171,500–$240,000 total cash range annually, with potential performance-based pay up to $274,500.

Company

hirify.global is a global travel company operating consumer brands, a B2B travel network, and travel advertising platforms.

What you will do

• Design, implement, and evolve backend APIs and distributed services for advertiser experiences.
• Build and operate ML-powered capabilities for recommendations, ranking, prediction, forecasting, and decision support.
• Apply LLMs and generative AI to campaign setup, configuration workflows, and operational automation.
• Develop batch and real-time data systems, feature pipelines, inference services, experimentation frameworks, and monitoring.
• Lead complex initiatives from technical design through deployment, observability, and iterative improvement.
• Partner with product, UX, analytics, business, ML engineering, and applied science teams while mentoring engineers.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree with 8+ years of relevant experience, Master’s degree with 6+ years, or equivalent professional experience.
• Strong experience building scalable backend services and distributed systems in production.
• Strong Python skills plus Java, Kotlin, or a similar backend language.
• 3+ years of hands-on experience building, deploying, and operating production ML or AI-powered systems.
• Experience with ML models, AI capabilities, data pipelines, model inference, and cloud-native platforms such as AWS or Kubernetes.
• Must work from Chicago, Illinois, with at least three office days per week; relocation assistance is unavailable.

Nice to have

• Experience with LLM systems, RAG pipelines, embeddings-based retrieval, or AI copilots.
• Experience with feature stores, model serving, experimentation platforms, Spark, or similar data processing tools.
• MLOps experience including model versioning, ML CI/CD, evaluation, monitoring, and retraining.
• Experience mentoring engineers or working in advertising, marketplaces, e-commerce, or travel.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible work model with regular office collaboration in Chicago.
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Paid time off and an Employee Assistance Program.
• Wellness and travel reimbursement, travel discounts, and IATAN membership.
• Inclusive and accessible recruiting experience with accommodation support.