Sr. Staff Applied AI Engineer

Qualified Health PBC; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 250,000 - 310,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity eligible

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

Hybrid work options

Onsite in Palo Alto

Job summary

Qualified Health PBC seeks a Sr. Staff Applied AI Engineer to define the technical direction for agentic AI systems across multiple product lines. This role combines architecture ownership, platform-level leadership, and hands-on work on advanced AI problems.

Responsibilities include setting standards for LLM evaluation, deployment, safety, and monitoring, and mentoring senior staff. Onsite role in Palo Alto with equity eligibility and competitive compensation.

Qualifications

• Deep software engineering foundation with Python required.
• 9+ years building production software and ML engineering, including 2+ years of hands-on production LLM or agentic work.
• Strong ML fundamentals with hands-on experience developing, training, fine-tuning, and evaluating ML models.

Responsibilities

• Define the technical architecture and roadmap for agentic workflow infrastructure shared across multiple product lines.
• Partner with engineering leadership on build‑vs‑buy and platform investment decisions.
• Set engineering standards for LLM evaluation, deployment, safety, and monitoring across several teams, and help shape AI governance.
• Serve as a technical escalation point for high‑ambiguity problems that cross product lines.
• Mentor and develop Staff and Senior engineers and contribute to the applied AI career ladder.
• Track frontier models and ecosystems and determine what is worth adopting at Qualified Health.

Skills

Python

Education

Bachelor’s+11 years or Master’s+9 years in CS/Engineering

Tools

OpenAI

Anthropic

Mistral

LLM

MLOps

Job description

Qualified Health PBC is seeking a Sr. Staff Applied AI Engineer to define the technical direction for agentic AI systems spanning multiple product lines. The role combines architecture ownership, platform-level engineering leadership, and hands‑on focus on complex applied AI problems.

Responsibilities

• Define the technical architecture and roadmap for agentic workflow infrastructure shared across multiple product lines.
• Partner with engineering leadership on build‑vs‑buy and platform investment decisions.
• Set engineering standards for LLM evaluation, deployment, safety, and monitoring across several teams, and help shape QH’s AI governance approach.
• Serve as a technical escalation point for high‑ambiguity problems that cross product lines.
• Mentor and develop Staff and Senior engineers and contribute to the applied AI career ladder.
• Track the frontier models and ecosystems (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, etc.) and determine what is worth adopting at Qualified Health.

Requirements

• Deep software engineering foundation with Python required, including a track record of architecting systems used across multiple teams.
• 9+ years building production software and ML engineering, including 2+ years of hands‑on production LLM or agentic work.
• Strong machine learning fundamentals with hands‑on experience developing, training, fine‑tuning, and evaluating ML models (may include traditional ML, deep learning, predictive modeling, NLP, or other applied ML disciplines).
• Proven experience taking ML models from experimentation to production deployment, scaling, monitoring, and ongoing optimization, including at the platform level.
• Strong understanding of ML pipelines, model serving, and MLOps.
• Deep expertise in workflow automation for AI‑driven systems at a platform level.
• Proven experience setting technical direction and standards adopted across more than one product line.
• Demonstrated ability to operate with high autonomy on ambiguous, high‑stakes problems.
• Track record influencing technical decisions with engineering leadership and non‑technical stakeholders.

Required Technologies

• Python
• OpenAI
• Anthropic
• Mistral
• LLM
• MLOps

Education (Desirable)

• Bachelor’s degree plus 11 years, or Master’s degree plus 9 years in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience).

Additional Desirable Skills

• Recognized expertise (talks, publications, open source, prior platform‑level roles) in applied AI or agentic systems.
• Experience building AI infrastructure in a regulated or high‑stakes domain (healthcare, finance, etc.).
• History of building or scaling a technical function in a startup.
• Experience mentoring Staff‑level engineers.

Location and Work Arrangement

Palo Alto, CA (onsite).

Pay & Benefits

• The pay range for this role is $250,000 to $310,000 per year, depending on skills, qualifications, experience, and location.
• Equity eligibility is included.
• Competitive salaries with equity packages.
• Robust medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• Flexible working hours.
• Hybrid work options.
• Inclusive environment.