Head of Applied AI Engineering

Vi; United States; On-site; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Vi is seeking a Head of AI Deployment to lead technical execution of AI applications in healthcare and pharma. This pivotal role involves overseeing all AI integration and deployment processes across various client environments.

The ideal candidate will have extensive experience in engineering leadership, AI deployment, and client partnership strategies, ensuring HIPAA compliance and operational excellence. Strong back-end knowledge in Python and cloud computing is essential for success in this role.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in engineering & delivery leadership.
• Strong proficiency in deploying and optimizing AI models.
• Experience with agentic systems and production AI agents.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor AI engineers and manage technical success.
• Oversee deployment lifecycle from pre-sales to long-term expansion.
• Act as a technical executive for strategic enterprise accounts.

Skills

Engineering leadership in high-stakes environments

AI/ML deployment and optimization

Backend and data foundation in TypeScript/Python/SQL

Client-facing leadership

Business development

Education

Technical degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering

Tools

AWS (S3, K8s, SageMaker)

ETL/ELT processes

Job description

We are seeking a Head of AI Deployment to lead our technical execution and delivery of Vi's agentic AI applications with high-stake healthcare, pharma and wellness enterprises. This is a high-impact leadership role sitting at the intersection of Engineering, Product, and Commercial Growth. You will be responsible for leading all of our AI deployment squads across all verticals and clients, ensuring that our predictive, precise and personalized agents are successfully integrated into the complex production environments and execution of patients, care team and operational next-best actions. You will oversee the entire deployment lifecycle - from pre-sales technical discovery to long-term commercial expansion - across our healthcare, pharma and wellness verticals.

Key Responsibilities

• Hands-On Leadership & Team Growth: Build, hire, and mentor a high-performing organization of Applied AI Engineers. Own the department charter, ROI performance, and technical best practices
• End-to-End Delivery Management: Own and manage the technical success of agentic AI deployments, ensuring systems are HIPAA-compliant, scalable, and deeply integrated with client EHR/EMR, CRM, and claims data systems
• Strategic Client Partnership: Act as the primary technical executive for strategic enterprise accounts, translating complex business workflows into production-ready AI configurations
• Pre-Sales & Commercial Strategy: Partner with Sales and Growth teams to lead technical discovery, underwrite high-ROI use cases, and drive expansion/upsell opportunities within existing accounts
• Product & Engineering Feedback Loop: Collaborate with Platform Engineering and Product teams to turn field-derived configuration patterns into reusable components and platform improvements
• Operational Excellence: Oversee the design of robust data ingestion pipelines, real-time agent infrastructure, and output guardrails to ensure agents remain compliant and safe

What We're Looking For

• 10+ years in hands-on engineering & delivery leadership in high-stakes environments; proven end-to-end ownership of outcomes
• Strong Deep AI/ML fluency - deploying, fine-tuning, and optimizing models at scale, including proprietary models, custom agents, and 3rd-party frontier models (e.g. Anthropic, Bedrock etc)
• Agentic systems expertise - building and operating production AI agents (multimodal, voice/text, operational workflows) with orchestration, guardrails, and evaluation
• Strong backend + data foundation - TypeScript/Python/SQL; APIs, real-time services, and scalable data pipelines (ETL/ELT, streaming)
• Technical degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or similar
• Real-time & distributed systems - event-driven architectures, WebSockets/streaming, high-throughput production systems
• Cloud & data stack depth - AWS (S3, K8s, SageMaker), Spark/Iceberg/ClickHouse, AI tooling; strong infra/compute tradeoff judgment
• Healthcare & compliance - EHR/EMR, claims, pharmacy integrations; HIPAA/SOC2, PHI handling and auditability
• Client-facing + team leadership - leads enterprise engagements and high-talent FDE teams; translates workflows into scalable, ROI-driven systems; thrives in 0 to 1 and scale environments
• Business development skills to act as a key player way in 'land and expand' motions across enterprise accounts
• Significant startup experience throughout career, playing a key role as a founding member or having an impact at an early-stage startup (less than 150 employees)