Staff Software Engineer (AI Foundation Model)

Location: Boston or San Francisco Bay Area; hybrid workplace

Company

hirify.global is a publicly traded aerospace and defense company developing autonomous flight software and a non-human pilot for aircraft.

What you will do

• Design, build, maintain, and technically guide foundation models, distributed training pipelines, inference infrastructure, experiment tracking, and model registries.
• Define model evaluation, benchmarking, and regression-testing standards for safety and performance thresholds.
• Architect the foundational pipeline for ingesting, processing, labeling, and versioning high-volume flight and sensor data.
• Identify systemic bottlenecks and define shared interfaces with AI infrastructure, simulation, and flight software teams.
• Mentor engineers, lead technical scoping and estimation, conduct design reviews, and contribute to technical hiring.
• Document architecture decisions, system designs, and operational runbooks, while evaluating relevant open-source tools and frameworks.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including substantial work in next-generation AI models, ML infrastructure, MLOps, data engineering, or AI platforms.
• Experience developing AI-first autonomy stacks covering perception, behavior planning, prediction, and actuation using Transformer architectures.
• Strong proficiency in PyTorch and TensorFlow, plus at least one systems language: C++, C, Rust, or Go.
• Experience with distributed training frameworks and reliable large-scale training infrastructure.
• Experience designing high-volume streaming and batch data pipelines, data versioning, heterogeneous sensor-data processing, and model evaluation frameworks.
• Ability to independently deliver production-grade systems and influence technical direction across teams.

Nice to have

• Experience in aerospace, automotive autonomy, robotics, or other safety-critical real-time domains.
• Experience deploying models on heterogeneous HPC systems such as NVIDIA Thor or Orin.
• Experience with simulation infrastructure, synthetic data, domain randomization, or NVIDIA Cosmos.
• Experience with model quantization, TensorRT, hardware-aware compilation, or embedded accelerators.
• Familiarity with aviation data formats, avionics buses, cameras, LiDAR, radar, or IMU sensors.

Culture & Benefits

• Work in a fast-moving, research-driven aerospace and defense environment.
• Operate with significant autonomy and influence technical decisions across multiple teams.
• Contribute to the development and certification of autonomous aircraft systems.
• Collaborate with global flight-test facilities, including locations in New Zealand and the United States.