Applied AI Engineer

Openloop-Health; Des Moines (IA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical Insurance

Flexible PTO

401(k) + Company Match

Life Insurance

Pet insurance

Job summary

OpenLoop seeks engineers to build production-grade LLM-based agents for healthcare AI infrastructure. You will work across model providers, evaluation, retrieval, and observability, ensuring secure handling of patient data while collaborating with product and clinical teams.

The role is open at Senior, Staff, and Senior Staff levels with calibration during the process based on scope and depth you bring. Strong cloud and systems skills are essential.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 5 to 15+ years of software engineering experience.
• Hands-on Production LLM experience with real users.
• Depth in agent runtime, evaluation, retrieval, or observability & cost.
• Experience measuring AI systems with evaluation data.
• Strong production engineering across testing, debugging, services and APIs.
• Experience handling sensitive data with a security-first mindset.

Responsibilities

• Ship Production Agents: build and run LLM-based agents that real users rely on.
• Agent Runtime & Orchestration: run, call tools, manage context, handle timeouts and sandboxing.
• Evaluation: create tests and evals to quantify improvements.
• Model Access & Operations: manage multiple model providers and version upgrades.
• Observability & Cost: trace actions, monitor production behavior and AI spend.
• Grounding & Retrieval: connect agents to real data via retrieval and prompt design.
• Workflow Design: decide steps an agent can do vs escalation to humans.
• Security, Privacy & Safety: protect PHI and defend against misuse.
• Cloud & Data Foundations: build on GCP with data platform teams.
• Raise the Bar: participate in code/design reviews and mentor others.
• Cross-functional Communication: explain AI trade-offs to non-technical partners.
• Other duties as assigned.

Skills

Senior Software Eng

Production LLM

AI Depth

Evaluation Rigor

Engineering Fundamentals

Data Security

Greenfield Mindset

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering

Tools

GCP

Model Versioning

Retrieval (RAG)

Job description

About OpenLoop

OpenLoop was co-founded by CEO, Dr. Jon Lensing, and COO, Christian Williams, with the vision to bring care anywhere. Our telehealth support solutions are thoughtfully designed to streamline and simplify go-to-market care delivery for companies offering meaningful virtual support to patients across an expansive array of specialties, in all 50 states.

About the Role

OpenLoop is building the future of healthcare infrastructure. We are hiring for this role at the Senior, Staff and Senior Staff levels. Apply once; we will calibrate level during the process based on the scope you have carried and the depth you bring, not on years alone.

What You'll Do

• Ship Production Agents: Build and run LLM-based agents and assistants that real users depend on, not prototypes.

• Agent Runtime & Orchestration: Build how agents run, call tools, hold context and hand off work, including failure handling, retries, timeouts and sandboxing.

• Evaluation: Build evaluation sets, test harnesses, regression tests and AI-graded evals so the team can show "this got better" with numbers and catch regressions before users do.

• Model Access & Operations: Work across multiple model providers, manage version upgrades and plan fallbacks for when a provider fails.

• Observability & Cost: Trace what agents did and why, monitor behavior in production, and attribute AI spend to each agent and use case.

• Grounding & Retrieval: Connect agents to real, messy company data through retrieval (RAG), context design and prompt engineering, so answers are based on facts.

• Workflow Design: Work with operations teams to decide which steps of a human workflow an agent can do reliably, and when it should escalation to a person.

• Security, Privacy & Safety: Keep patient data (PHI) protected in every AI system, control what agents can access, and defend against misuse such as prompt injection.

• Cloud & Data Foundations: Build on GCP and partner with the Data Platform teams who provide the governed data agents use.

• Raise the Bar: Contribute to code and design review, and help engineers who are newer to AI.

• Cross-functional Work: Explain AI trade-offs in plain language to product, operations and clinical stakeholders, including when the honest answer is "the AI isn't ready for this yet."

• Other duties as assigned.

Who You Are

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field

• Proven Engineering Experience: 5 to 15+ years of software engineering experience.

• Production LLM Experience: Hands-on experience building and running LLM-based systems in production that real users relied on, not only demos, prototypes or personal projects. Senior Staff candidates typically bring 2+ years.

• Core AI Depth: Real hands-on depth in at least one core area: agent runtime, evaluation, retrieval, or observability and cost. At Staff and Senior Staff we look for depth in agent runtime or evaluation, and at Senior Staff a second deep area plus working knowledge across the rest.

• Evaluation Rigor: Experience measuring whether an AI system works with evaluation data, rather than "it seemed to work."

• Engineering Fundamentals: Strong production engineering across testing, debugging, services, APIs, deployment and on-call.

• Data & Security Fluency: Experience handling sensitive data with a security-first mindset.

• Comfort working in a greenfield space, and clear communication with technical and non-technical partners

Preferred Qualifications:

• Regulated-Industry Experience: Healthcare (PHI, HIPAA), finance or insurance.

• GCP Experience: Running production services on Google Cloud.

• Model Operations: Experience migrating a system between model versions or providers.

• Classic ML Background: Machine learning experience beyond LLMs.

• Internal Platforms: Built a platform used by other engineering teams.

• Team Leadership: For Senior Staff, experience leading a small team's technical direction from zero and growing a single pod into multiple teams.

Our Benefits

In addition, for salaried positions you would also be eligible for:

• Medical, Dental, and Vision plans

• Flexible Spending/Health Savings Accounts

• Flexible PTO

• 401(k) + Company Match

• Life Insurance, Pet insurance, and more

Our Company

We have a relatively flat organizational structure here at OpenLoop. Everyone is encouraged to bring ideas to the table and make things happen. This fits in well with our core values of Autonomy, Competence and Belonging, as we want everyone to feel empowered and supported to do their best work.

Sound like a good fit? We’d love to meet you.