Principal AI Engineer

Innovaccer Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 210,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous PTO

Parental leave

Recognition program

Comprehensive insurance

Job summary

Innovaccer is seeking a Principal AI Engineer in San Francisco to design and build the most critical backend components and data pipelines. You will personally write production code, own major systems end to end, and mentor engineers while guiding architecture and security.

You will lead end-to-end AI/ML feature integration, ensure scalable performance, and balance cost with value, partnering with product and clinical teams to meet ambitious healthcare goals.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with large-scale systems.
• Hands-on coding daily in modern languages.
• Experience integrating AI/ML into products and production systems.
• Familiarity with healthcare data standards and regulatory compliance.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and ship complex backend services and data pipelines.
• Lead architecture decisions for scalable, secure systems.
• Mentor engineers and drive engineering best practices.
• Ensure HIPAA/GDPR compliance in implementations.
• Partner with product and clinical teams to deliver impact.

Skills

Senior leadership

Production coding

Backend architecture

AI/ML integration

Cloud platforms

CI/CD

Kubernetes

Python

Java

Go

Security & compliance

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering

Master's or PhD preferred

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

GCP

Azure

Job description

About the Role

As a Principal AI Engineer at Innovaccer, you will be one of our most senior engineers and you will stay deep in the code. You'll personally design and build the hardest, highest-impact parts of our platform — backend services, data pipelines, and the AI/ML-powered features that increasingly define our products — while setting the technical bar for how those systems are built. This is a builder's role first: you'll write production code, own complex components end to end, and lead by doing, while also guiding architecture and mentoring the engineers around you. You'll work closely with product, clinical, and engineering peers to turn ambitious healthcare goals into robust, scalable software that ships. If you want to operate at Principal scope without stepping away from the keyboard, this role is for you.

A Day in the Life

• Design, build, and ship the most complex and critical components of Innovaccer's platform — backend services, APIs, and data pipelines — writing high-quality production code yourself.
• Build AI/ML-powered product features end to end: integrating models, designing the systems and data flows around them, and ensuring they perform reliably in production.
• Own technical architecture for major systems, making hands-on design decisions for scalability, performance, security, and cost, then implementing them.
• Lead by example on engineering best practices across the full SDLC — code quality, testing, security, observability, and operational excellence — and raise the bar through the code you write and review.
• Build resilient, well-tested services that integrate cleanly across products and with external healthcare systems.
• Ensure the software you build complies with healthcare and data-protection requirements, including HIPAA and GDPR, embedding compliance and security into the implementation.
• Debug, profile, and harden production systems, taking ownership of reliability and incident response for the systems you build.
• Provide hands-on technical mentorship to senior and staff engineers through design reviews, pairing, and code review.
• Partner with product and clinical stakeholders to turn real-world needs into well-scoped, technically sound designs you can deliver.
• Evaluate and select technologies, frameworks, and tooling, balancing capability, cost, risk, and time-to-value.

• Bachelor's, Master's, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience with a strong track record of personally building and shipping large-scale production systems.
• Deep, current, hands-on coding expertise in one or more modern languages (e.g.,Python, Java, Go, or similar) — this role writes code daily.
• Strong software design skills across distributed systems, backend services, APIs, and data-intensive architectures.
• Experience building and integrating AI/ML into products — connecting models to real systems, handling data flows, and operationalizing them in production (you don't need to be a research scientist, but you should be comfortable building AI/ML-powered features).
• Hands-on experience operating production systems: CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, monitoring, performance tuning, and incident response.
• Familiarity with healthcare data standards (e.g., FHIR, HL7) and regulatory compliance (HIPAA, GDPR), or the ability to ramp quickly on a regulated domain.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and strong communication, with the ability to align engineers and stakeholders around a technical approach.
• Strong experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and containerization/orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).

We offer competitive benefits to set you up for success in and outside of work.

Here’s What We Offer

• Generous Paid Time Off: Recharge and relax with 20 days of fixed time off per year, in addition to company holidays—because we believe work-life balance fuels performance.
• Best-in-Class Parental Leave: Spend quality time with your growing family. We offer one of the industry’s most generous parental leave policies to support you during life’s most important moments.
• Recognition & Rewards: We celebrate wins—big and small. Get rewarded with monetary incentives and company-wide recognition for your impact and dedication. Your hard work won't go unnoticed.
• Comprehensive Insurance Coverage: Stay covered with medical, dental, and vision insurance, plus 100% company-paid short- and long-term disability and basic life insurance. Optional perks include discounted legal aid and pet insurance.