Principal Engineer, Applied AI (Fullstack/Backend)

Hims, Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Hims & Hers is a leading health and wellness platform redefining care with personalized, scalable AI-powered patient experiences. We are seeking a Principal Engineer to architect the Applied AI stack, owning end-to-end patient interactions from intake to ongoing care companionship.

You will balance building for today with long-term product evolution, while mentoring senior engineers and raising the bar on reliability, observability, and cross-team collaboration.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of professional software engineering experience with deep architectural expertise.
• Proven track record influencing technical strategy at group level.
• Experience building production systems at scale, with emphasis on robustness and scalability.
• Experience owning service architecture across a full stack.
• Productionization mindset focused on uptime and reliability.
• Hands-on engineering ability and willingness to stay close to code.
• Some exposure to LLM/AI services.
• Ability to balance short-term delivery with long-term architecture.

Responsibilities

• Own the overall architecture for the Applied AI stack end-to-end.
• Productionize AI-driven experiences and harden services for uptime and scale.
• Instill observability and operational readiness practices.
• Mentor senior technical leaders and foster growth.
• Navigate ambiguity and accelerate delivery of strategic initiatives.
• Translate customer needs into scalable technical solutions.
• Design systems to support sustainable growth and non-functional priorities.

Skills

Architectural design

Productionization

Observability

Hands-on coding

AI/LLM exposure

Mentorship

Cross-org influence

Communication

Job description

Hims & Hers is the leading health and wellness platform, on a mission to help the world feel great through the power of better health. We are redefining healthcare by putting the customer first and delivering access to care that is affordable, accessible, and personal, from diagnosis to treatment to delivery. No two people are the same, so we provide access to personalized care designed for results. By normalizing health & wellness challenges and innovating on their solutions, we’re making better health outcomes easier to achieve.

Hims & Hers is a public company, traded on the NYSE under the ticker symbol “HIMS.” To learn more about the brand and offerings, you can visit hims.com/about and hims.com/how-it-works. For information on the company’s outstanding benefits, culture, and its talent‑first flexible/remote work approach, see below and visit www.hims.com/careers-professionals.

About the Role

AI is disrupting our stack from the inside, and we're looking for a Principal Engineer to architect that transformation from day one. Applied AI is a small, fast‑moving team building a fresh take on how patient care should happen, from intake through ongoing care companionship. While much of the team is focused on research and rapid experimentation, this role is the productionization counterpart — the person who takes what's working and makes it robust, scalable, and reliable enough to run in production at the core of the patient experience.

You’ll be the key architect of the patient‑facing experience end‑to‑end, owning how the services across the stack fit together. This is a hands‑on role for someone who thinks about robustness, scalability, and debuggability from day one, and who can balance building for today with architecting for where the product needs to go over the next several years.

Key Responsibilities

• Own Service Architecture Own the overall architecture for the Applied AI stack — how individual services blend together into a coherent, end‑to‑end patient‑facing experience, from intake through ongoing companion interactions.
• Productionize AI-Driven Experiences Partner with research‑focused teammates who move fast on experimentation, and take their work to production: hardening services for uptime, reliability, and scale. Bring engineering rigor to a team that's optimized for speed of iteration.
• Reliability & Operational Excellence Instill best practices around debugging, observability, and operational readiness. Design for robustness and scalability from day one rather than retrofitting it later.
• Mentorship & Talent Growth Mentor senior technical leaders, elevating engineering capabilities across the organization. Champion initiatives that foster talent density, engineering rigor, and a culture of continuous learning
• Ambiguity Navigation & Execution Acceleration Lead through complexity and ambiguity, clarifying direction where ownership is unclear. Remove organizational blockers, simplify decision‑making, and accelerate delivery of strategic initiatives
• Customer‑Centric Engineering Translate customer needs and product goals into scalable technical solutions. Define principles and patterns that embed customer obsession into our platform’s architecture
• Sustainability & Scalability Design systems and team boundaries to support sustainable growth. Drive investment in non‑functional priorities (e.g., observability, migrations, reliability) early in the design process

What You Bring

• 15+ years of professional software engineering experience with deep architectural expertise and a record of delivering production systems at scale.
• Proven track record of influencing technical strategy and delivering cross‑org technical initiatives at the group or organizational level.
• Excellent track record standing up services at scale in production, with a demonstrated ability to think about robustness, scalability, and debuggability from day one.
• Deep experience owning service architecture across a full stack — understanding how services should blend together, not just how to build any one of them well.
• A "productionization" mindset: comfortable being the counterweight to a fast‑moving research/experimentation culture, focused on uptime and reliability.
• Hands‑on engineering ability; you want to stay close to the code and the architecture, not just the roadmap.
• Some exposure to LLM/AI services — you don't need deep AI expertise, but you should have tested the waters with LLM or AI‑powered systems in some capacity.
• Ability to think long‑term and build for the future, balancing near‑term delivery with durable architecture.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to partner across research, product, and clinical stakeholders.

You’ll Thrive Here If You:

• Create alignment and momentum in ambiguous or complex technical spaces.
• Balance short‑term deliverables with long‑term scalability, system health, and customer experience.
• Lead with curiosity, adaptability, and principled decision‑making.
• Take initiative to address cross‑squad blockers, scale constraints, or misaligned priorities before they escalete.
• Drive consistent, action‑oriented execution even without perfect clarity.
• Mentor senior engineering talent and reinforce a culture of growth, feedback, and high technical standards.
• Inspire confidence through transparency, humility, and deep technical credibility.
• Advocate for customers through scalable, resilient backend design that anticipates clinical complexity and future scale.
• Want to help architect how AI reshapes a company's stack and product, from the inside, from day one.

We are committed to building a workforce that reflects diverse perspectives and prioritizes ethics, wellness, and a strong sense of belonging.

Hims considers all qualified applicants for employment, including applicants with arrest or conviction records, in accordance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, the California Fair Chance Act, and any similar state or local fair chance laws.

It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.

Hims & Hers is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, please contact us at [e-mail] and describe the needed accommodation. Your privacy is important to us, and any information you share will only be used for the legitimate purpose of considering your request for accommodation. Hims & Hers gives consideration to all qualified applicants without regard to any protected status, including disability. Please do not send resumes to this email address.

To learn more about how we collect, use, retain, and disclose Personal Information, please visit our Global Candidate Privacy Statement.