Sr. Director of Machine Learning

Hims, Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 250,000 - 450,000; Full time

Job summary

Hims & Hers is seeking a Sr. Director of Machine Learning to lead the AI services driving the core patient experience.

This builder-leadership role will define the technical direction for production-ready LLM and model-powered capabilities, and grow a team of ML engineers and production specialists. You will partner with ML platform, Clinical, and evaluation groups to ensure measurable, safe, and continuously improving AI solutions across clinical intake, provider support, personalization,

Qualifications

• 14+ years of experience in machine learning and software engineering.
• Experience shipping ML-powered products to production at scale.
• Strong communication with executives and clinical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow ML engineers, applied scientists, and ML production engineers.
• Own strategy for leveraging frontier LLMs and related tooling.
• Design harnesses around LLMs for dependable outputs in product/clinical workflows.
• Direct development of in-house ML models for medical and recommendation use cases.
• Set production standards: SLOs, latency, cost, and governance.
• Make build vs. fine-tune vs. prompt decisions with evolving capabilities.
• Partner with Clinical to ensure safe, supervised models.
• Coordinate with ML infra and evaluation teams on metrics and feedback loops.
• Collaborate with product, data science, security, legal, and compliance to scope ML work.

Skills

14+ years ML/SE experience

8+ years leading ML teams

Shipping ML-powered products

Executive-level communication

Tools

LLM platforms

Evaluation pipelines

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

We're looking for a Sr. Director of Machine Learning to lead the teams building the AI services at the core of the Hims & Hers experience. This leader owns the applied side of our AI portfolio: the LLM-powered services that handle clinical intake, provider support, personalization, and operational workflows, as well as the in-house deep learning models that drive recommendations and predictions where accuracy and clinical soundness matter most.

This is a builder's leadership role. You'll set the technical direction for how we turn foundation models and custom models into dependable production services, grow a team of ML modelers and ML production engineers, and partner with our ML platform and evaluation organization to make sure what we ship is measurable, safe, and continuously improving.

You will:

• Lead and grow ML engineers, applied scientists, and ML production engineers building AI services end to end — from problem framing through production operation.
• Own the strategy for how we build on top of frontier LLMs: prompt and context design, retrieval, tool and function calling, agentic workflows, structured output reliability, fallback and degradation behavior, latency and cost management.
• Drive the design of the harnesses and glue around LLM calls — orchestration, validation, guardrails, deterministic scaffolding — so probabilistic components produce dependable, auditable outputs inside product and clinical workflows.
• Direct development of in-house deep learning and classical ML models where a custom model outperforms a general‑purpose one, including clinical and recommendation use cases such as medication and treatment‑plan recommendations surfaced to providers.
• Set the bar for how AI services are productionized: SLOs for accuracy, latency and cost, graceful failure, rollout strategy, and clear ownership of production behavior.
• Make build‑versus‑fine‑tune‑versus‑prompt decisions deliberately, and revisit them as model capabilities and pricing shift.
• Partner with Clinical and Medical Affairs to ensure clinically‑facing models are developed with appropriate oversight, validation, and human‑in‑the‑loop design; ensure providers stay in control of clinical decisions.
• Partner closely with the ML infrastructure and evaluation team members to define evaluation criteria, feedback loops, and annotation needs for every service your team ships — and to hold your team accountable to the resulting metrics.
• Work with Product, Data Science, Engineering, Security, Legal, and Compliance to translate ambiguous business and clinical problems into scoped, high‑leverage ML work.
• Establish engineering and scientific standards across the team: experiment design, model documentation, reproducibility, code quality, and responsible AI practices.
• Build the team's hiring, leveling, and mentorship practices; develop senior individual contributors and managers.
• Act as a senior technical voice in the AI organization, shaping multi‑year roadmap and investment decisions and representing AI strategy to executive leadership.

You have:

• 14+ years of experience in machine learning and software engineering, including 8+ years leading ML teams and experience managing managers or senior tech leads.
• A track record of shipping ML-powered products to production at scale — not just prototypes or research — and owning them operationally over time.
• Depth in understanding modern LLM application development: RAG, prompt engineering, fine‑tuning and adaptation, evaluation, agent and tool‑calling architectures, and the practical limits of each.
• Real experience training and deploying deep learning models (recommendation, ranking, classification, or sequence models) where model quality directly affects user or business outcomes.
• Strong software architecture judgment — you can reason about service boundaries, data flow, failure modes, and cost as fluently as you can about model architecture.
• Experience balancing model quality against latency, cost, and operational complexity, and making those tradeoffs legible to non‑technical partners.
• Comfort operating with ambiguity: taking a vague, high‑value problem and turning it into a shipped system with measurable impact.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to influence peers, executives, and clinical stakeholders.
• Bonus: experience in healthcare, digital health, or another regulated domain or with safety‑critical ML systems.
• Bonus: experience with clinical decision support, clinical NLP, or ML systems where a human expert is the end user.

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.

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