Vice President of Engineering, Core AI

athenahealth; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

An innovative firm is seeking a visionary Vice President of Engineering to lead their AI Core team. This role is pivotal in shaping the future of AI within the organization, focusing on foundational AI platforms and driving technical excellence. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience in engineering leadership and a deep understanding of AI/ML infrastructure. You will collaborate with product teams to embed AI capabilities across various healthcare solutions, ensuring compliance with regulations while fostering innovation. If you're a strategic leader ready to make a significant impact in healthcare through AI, this opportunity is for you.

Benefits

Flexible work hours

Health insurance

Retirement plan

Professional development opportunities

Remote work options

Qualifications

• 15+ years of engineering leadership experience required.
• Expertise in AI/ML infrastructure and systems is essential.
• Passion for AI ethics and responsible innovation is a must.

Responsibilities

• Lead a multidisciplinary engineering team focused on AI capabilities.
• Define and evolve the vision for AI platforms and services.
• Facilitate collaboration between AI teams and product managers.

Skills

AI Leadership

Engineering Management

AI/ML Infrastructure

Cross-Functional Collaboration

AI Ethics

Education

Bachelor's Degree in Engineering or related field

Master's Degree preferred

Tools

MLOps

FMOps

AI Governance Frameworks

Job description

Join us as we work to create a thriving ecosystem that delivers accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all.

Vice President of Engineering, Core AI

Location: Hybrid work model anchored to our Boston, MA office location.

About the Role: We are seeking a visionary and dynamic Vice President of Engineering to lead our AI Core team. This team serves as the center of excellence for AI at athenahealth, providing foundational AI platforms, expert guidance across key AI domains, and partnering with product teams embedding AI capabilities. The AI core team plays an essential role in harnessing artificial intelligence to transform our products for electronic health records, revenue cycle management, patient engagement, population health and payer services.

As a strategic leader and organizational connector, the VP of AI Engineering in collaboration with product management will drive the overall AI vision, technical direction, platform excellence, and collaborative engagement across R&D to enable innovative AI solutions that are accurate, scalable, and safe.

This is a unique opportunity to shape the future of AI at athenahealth by leading a small but highly impactful team at the heart of our innovative efforts. If you are a builder, connector, and visionary leader ready to drive meaningful changes in healthcare through AI, we invite you to apply.

Reporting To: Executive Vice President, Product Engineering

Key Responsibilities:

1. Leadership & Vision
   • Lead a high-performing, multidisciplinary engineering team focused on foundational AI capabilities and infrastructure.
   • Bring experience running AI Research Labs or Centers of Excellence at leading technology companies that publish academic papers, file patents, and shape AI innovation.
   • Act as a hybrid technical leader and people manager, contributing deep subject matter expertise while developing organizational capability and reliably delivering AI platforms and services.
   • Define and evolve the vision and strategic roadmap for AI platforms and services, balancing first-party development and third-party integrations.
   • Establish thought leadership and elevate the market perception of athenahealth as a leader in AI.
2. Subject Matter Expertise
   • Direct the AI Core team’s research staff/program to ensure we stay current on advancements in foundational models, AI evaluation/verification, agent-based systems, and human-AI interaction.
   • Stay current on US healthcare relevant AI regulations and best practices for responsible AI and incorporate into our AI governance process.
   • Participate in external industry forums and engage with key partners and customers.
3. Platform & Infrastructure
   • Provide application teams governed access to ML/AI platforms and infrastructure, enabling secure, compliant, cost-effective, and high-performing use of innovative ML/AI models. This includes classic machine learning operations (MLOps) and foundational model operations (FMOps).
   • Curate an opinionated model garden that will include third party commercial and open-source models, along with in-house developed models. Models will support language, vision, and audio/speech modalities.
   • Provide environments for in-house model development and foundational model fine tuning including related capabilities such as quantization and distillation.
   • Provide required platforms & infrastructure to enable techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and Mixture of Experts (MoE) approaches to inferencing.
   • Define and enforce AI governance to ensure we stay compliant with regulatory requirements and follow responsible AI practices.
4. Organizational connector & AI ecosystem architect
   • Serve as a strategic partner and SME to product teams embedding AI in electronic health record, practice management, revenue cycle management, population health, patient engagement and payer services products. Help guide product teams to adopt best practice architecture, design & implementation.
   • Facilitate collaboration between the Core AI teams MLOps/FMOps platform team, AI researchers, product team engineers & product managers, clinical safety, regulatory, and legal stakeholders.
   • Understand the product teams needs for AI model modalities (language, vision, audio, multimodal), model types (base/chat/instruct), model characteristics (context size, latency, cost…) to drive the curation of athenahealth's model garden.
   • Understand the product team needs for Agentic AI systems and help ensure we have a consistent approach that ensures verifiable, explainable, and interoperable agentic AI systems.
   • Establish standardized tools, frameworks, reference patterns and best practices for application teams to consume as they embed AI throughout their products. Emphasis should be placed on providing strong guidance on prompt engineering techniques, grounding techniques and validation techniques to ensure accuracy when using non-deterministic foundational models.
   • Develop the R&D teams’ AI capabilities through education and talent development. The Core AI team will define and deliver continuous AI education for the broad R&D org.

Qualifications:

• 15+ years of engineering leadership experience, including managing high-performing teams and delivering platform-level services.
• Demonstrated experience in leading AI research laboratories or innovation centers at prominent technology firms.
• Demonstrated technical expertise in AI/ML infrastructure and systems, including foundational models, agent frameworks, and scalable MLOps & FMOps.
• Deep understanding of the AI product lifecycle, including prompt engineering, RAG, verification, and multimodal interaction.
• Effective collaborator with experience leading cross-functional projects and simplifying technical topics for diverse audiences.
• Expertise in creating public-facing SaaS AI/ML products.
• Passion for AI ethics, safety, and responsible innovation.

Preferred:

• Experience in the healthcare domain or business applications domain.
• Experience in scaled R&D orgs (>1000 engineers) that are globally distributed.
• Experience with large-scale SaaS applications (billions of transactions a day & petabytes of data) and cloud native computing architectures.

About athenahealth: Our vision is to create a thriving ecosystem that delivers accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all. We pursue this through our medical record, revenue cycle, patient engagement, population health and payer services. athenahealth partners with healthcare organizations across the care continuum to drive clinical and financial results. Our expert teams build modern technology on an open, connected ecosystem, yielding insights that make a difference for our customers and their patients. We integrate AI throughout our product offerings to drive the efficiency of administrative and financial processes and improve the user experience for providers and patients.