Sr. Staff Applied AI Engineer (Tech Lead)

OpenLoop Health; United States; Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Medical, Dental & Vision

Flexible Spending / Health Savings

Generous PTO and hybrid-work гибкость

401(k) with Company Match

Life Insurance, Pet Insurance, and更多

Job summary

OpenLoop seeks a senior AI leader to establish the AI Platform as a foundational capability. You’ll own architecture, safety, and cost while coding and reviewing designs with engineers across the org.

You’ll shepherd agent runtime, evaluation, and grounding, partnering with business and operations to translate workflows into agent-driven processes, all while protecting PHI and HIPAA data.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering experience with real technical leadership.
• 2+ years building and running LLM-based systems in production.
• Deep hands-on expertise in agent runtime or evaluation.
• Track record of measuring AI quality with real evaluation methods and data.
• Experience leading a small team's technical direction.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for agent runtime, orchestration, and tool use.
• Build evaluation systems and AI-graded evals to prove quality.
• Make calls on model access, provider routing, and upgrades.
• Own observability and AI cost accounting to avoid surprises.
• Build retrieval/grounding over real company data for factual answers.
• Collaborate with business and ops to map human workflows to agent workflows.
• Protect patient data and ensure security/privacy across AI systems.
• Define infrastructure choices (GCP) and coordinate with the Data Platform team.
• Mentor engineers new to AI and raise code/design quality.
• Explain AI trade-offs to product, operations, and clinical stakeholders.

Skills

Software engineering leadership

LLM-based systems

Agent runtime

AI evaluation methods

Team leadership

Healthcare data security

Cloud experience (GCP)

Tools

GCP

Job description

About OpenLoop

OpenLoop was co-founded by CEO, Dr. Jon Lensing, and COO, Christian Williams, with the vision to bring care anywhere. Our telehealth support solutions are thoughtfully designed to streamline and simplify go-to-market care delivery for companies offering meaningful virtual support to patients across an expansive array of specialties, in all 50 states.

About the role

You'll be the first technical leader for AI at OpenLoop. You're joining the AI Platform pod as one of the earliest hires, which means the decisions you make now become the foundation everyone else builds on: how our AI agents run, how we know if they're actually good, how we keep them safe and affordable, and how other teams build on top of what you create.

This pod will eventually split into two teams, AI Infrastructure and AI Tools, so we need someone who can go deep in at least two of the core AI engineering disciplines while staying credible across all of them. Until we hire an AI Principal Engineer, you'll also carry the long-range technical direction for AI across the whole company. This is a hands‑on role. You'll write code and review designs, not just draw boxes on a whiteboard.

You'll partner closely with the AI Engineering Manager, who owns people and delivery while you own architecture and technical quality.

What you’ll do

• - Set the technical direction for agent runtime and orchestration: how agents call tools, hold context, and hand off work, and whether we build or adopt frameworks to do it
• - Build the evaluation systems that prove our AI is actually good, not just "seems to work," including regression tests and AI-graded evals
• - Make the call on model access and operations: routing across providers, managing version upgrades, and planning for what happens when a provider goes down
• - Own observability and cost: tracing what agents did and why, and attributing AI spend so nobody gets a surprise bill
• - Build retrieval and grounding over real, messy company data so agents answer with facts, not guesses
• - Work with business and ops teams to turn human workflows into agent workflows, and decide what should always stay with a person
• - Keep patient data protected in every AI system you touch. This is healthcare, so security and privacy aren't optional
• - Make sound calls on cloud and data infrastructure (we run on GCP) and partner well with the Data Platform team
• - Raise the bar through code and design review, and mentor engineers who are new to AI
• - Explain AI trade-offs in plain language to product, operations, and clinical stakeholders, including when the honest answer is "the AI isn't ready for this yet"

Who you are

• - 12 or more years of software engineering experience, with real technical leadership experience (tech lead, staff, or principal-level scope)
• - Two or more years building and running LLM-based systems in production, not just demos or personal projects
• - Deep, hands‑on expertise in agent runtime or evaluation, plus working knowledge across the rest of the AI engineering stack
• - A track record of measuring AI quality with real evaluation methods and data, not vibes
• - Experience leading a small team's technical direction from zero, or close to it

Preferred

• - Healthcare or other regulated-industry experience (PHI, HIPAA)
• - GCP experience
• - Experience building an internal platform used by other engineering teams
• - Background in classic machine learning as well as LLMs
• - Experience scaling a team from a single pod into multiple teams

What We Offer

• - Competitive compensation
• - Medical, Dental & Vision
• - Flexible Spending / Health Savings Accounts
• - Generous PTO and hybrid-work flexibility
• - 401(k) with Company Match
• - Life Insurance, Pet Insurance, and more

Our Company

We have a relatively flat organizational structure here at OpenLoop. Everyone is encouraged to bring ideas to the table and make things happen. This fits in well with our core values of Autonomy, Competence and Belonging, as we want everyone to feel empowered and supported to do their best work.

Sound like a good fit? We’d love to meet you.