Associate Director, App (AI)

Location: Cambridge, MA, USA or San Francisco, CA, USA

Salary: $204,000–$306,000 USD base salary, with bonus potential and early-stage equity.

Company

hirify.global builds AI-native scientific systems that combine advanced AI models with proprietary instruments to accelerate discovery across medicine, materials, and energy.

What you will do

• Build, mentor, and manage a high-performing team of 8–10 engineers across full-stack, agent, and platform disciplines.
• Define and execute the technical roadmap for the application layer in alignment with the broader AI and product strategy.
• Own end-to-end delivery of chat, agent, artifact, lab workflow, and ML pipeline integrations.
• Ensure reliability, performance, security, maintainability, and timely delivery across the application platform.
• Partner with ML researchers, scientists, product managers, designers, and engineering leaders to translate scientific workflows into product capabilities.
• Represent applied-AI work through conferences, presentations, writing, and other external thought leadership.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• 12+ years of engineering experience building and deploying large-scale production systems, including 5+ years leading senior engineers.
• Experience building and growing high-performing engineering teams in high-growth or early-stage environments.
• Deep technical judgment in applied AI, including agents, MCP, and context engineering.
• Full-stack experience with React, TypeScript, Python, FastAPI, SQL or NoSQL databases, AWS, and Kubernetes.
• Experience defining technical strategy, balancing scalability, performance, delivery speed, and maintainability, and collaborating with scientists and ML engineers.

Nice to have

• Leadership experience shipping AI-agent products, graph-based workflows, MCP tool-use protocols, RAG pipelines, or LLM orchestration frameworks.
• Product intuition for chat, agent, and copilot experiences.
• Experience with Terraform, CloudFormation, GitHub Actions, or other cloud infrastructure and CI/CD tools.
• Applied-AI thought leadership through conference talks, blog posts, or open source.
• Exposure to laboratory software, life sciences, material sciences, or scientific computing.

Culture & Benefits

• Startup-speed environment focused on truth, trust, curiosity, grit, and velocity.
• U.S. employees receive medical, dental, and vision coverage, life and disability insurance, paid parental leave, and flexible time off.
• Additional benefits include educational assistance, commuter benefits, and a subsidized lunch program for office-based employees.
• Employees outside the U.S. receive benefits tailored to their region; international salaries follow local market rates.