Director of AI & Biometrics

Location: Onsite five days per week in Munich, Germany

Company

hirify.global designs and builds the technology behind World, including the Orb biometric device, World ID privacy-preserving identity verification, and World App.

What you will do

• Own the vision, roadmap, and execution strategy for World’s iris and face recognition stack and related fraud defenses.
• Lead the full biometric ML lifecycle, including data acquisition, dataset governance, pipelines, training, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and iteration.
• Define performance goals balancing biometric accuracy, user experience, latency, robustness, privacy, and fraud resistance.
• Establish scientific and engineering standards covering reproducible experimentation, testing, code quality, reviews, documentation, and MLOps.
• Partner with hardware, product, security, and operations teams across sensing, image acquisition, on-device inference, and backend systems.
• Attract, coach, and scale a high-performing team through hiring, team design, career development, and organizational planning.

Requirements

• Strong science or engineering background in computer vision, machine learning, robotics, signal processing, or a related field.
• Deep understanding of modern and traditional computer vision and ML across the full lifecycle from data to production monitoring.
• Experience delivering production-grade ML systems, including deployment on mobile devices or other performance-constrained environments.
• Significant experience leading engineering or applied research teams, setting direction, prioritizing work, and driving execution.
• Demonstrated cross-functional leadership across product, engineering, research, and operations.
• Strong people-management experience, including mentoring, hiring, performance management, and team scaling.

Nice to have

• Expertise in iris recognition or face recognition, including evaluation methods and real-world failure modes.
• Experience with presentation attack detection, biometric fraud prevention, or adversarial robustness.
• Experience with privacy-enhancing technologies and privacy-by-design approaches, such as secure enclaves, on-device processing, cryptographic methods, differential privacy, federated learning, or secure aggregation.
• Experience operating ML systems at very large scale under strict compliance requirements.
• Experience with custom hardware deployment.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on privacy-preserving biometric systems designed for global-scale deployment.
• Collaborate across hardware, software, AI, cryptography, mobile engineering, security, product, and global operations.
• Join an organization of more than 400 people working on World technology.
• Operate in a research-driven environment focused on accuracy, latency, robustness, security, and responsible data governance.