Staff ML Engineer (ML/AI)

The role

This Staff ML/AI Engineer will define and drive the architecture for Lyra's machine learning and generative AI technology. The role acts as a technical anchor across engineering and data teams, and includes hands-on coding.

What you will do

• Design and execute the long-term roadmap for Lyra's ML and generative AI platform
• Architect training, fine-tuning and low-latency inference platforms, including RAG architecture, vector databases and evaluation/guardrail frameworks
• Set standards for the full AI/ML development lifecycle, from dataset lineage and CI/CD to model evaluation, red-teaming and production monitoring
• Partner with Product, Data Science, Security and Clinical leaders on AI capability roadmaps
• Mentor Senior ML Engineers and lead architectural reviews
• Lead by example through prototypes, critical-path architecture and coding

Required qualifications

• 8+ years deploying complex ML/AI solutions into mission-critical production environments
• Technical leadership track record
• Mastery of Python, RESTful API design, Protobuf and microservices architecture
• Expertise with Docker, Kubernetes, container orchestration and real-time inference services
• Hands-on experience with RAG pipelines, LLM fine-tuning, vector databases and LLM evaluation/guardrail frameworks
• Expertise with relational databases, low-latency key-value stores, and distributed queueing (e.g., Celery, Kafka) and data pipeline orchestration
• Strong experience architecting cloud-native solutions on AWS (or equivalent)
• Ability to distill ambiguous technical problems into clear strategic priorities and influence leadership

Nice to have

• Experience writing high-performance production code in Java or Kotlin
• Experience architecting AI/ML systems in highly regulated environments (HIPAA, SOC2, PHI/PII)
• Experience building internal developer platforms or ML tooling used by dozens of data scientists and engineers

About the company

Lyra Health is a provider of evidence-based mental health care, serving more than 20 million people globally through employer and health plan partnerships. Its Lyra Empower platform combines care and AI-powered technology.