Tech Lead, Applied AI

About the role

The Applied AI Technical Lead position at Abby Care is a full-time hybrid opportunity based in San Francisco, California, with four days per week in person. Abby Care is building an AI-native operating system for home care—one that manages the full lifecycle from caregiver and patient intake through care delivery, billing, and compliance. This role serves as the senior technical leader for Applied AI across the company, identifying the highest-leverage opportunities for AI, defining the technical architecture and roadmap, and leading the development of production systems that execute complex healthcare workflows.

What You’ll Work On

• Set the Applied AI vision and roadmap: Define how AI will transform workflows across intake and enrollment, care delivery, revenue cycle management, and compliance. Partner with Engineering, Product, Clinical, Operations, and Analytics to prioritize the highest-leverage opportunities.
• Build the intelligence layer of Abby Care’s operating system: Architect and develop agentic systems that reason over complex information, interact with internal tools, and execute consequential healthcare workflows end to end.
• Design for safe and scalable autonomy: Establish human-in-the-loop and human-on-the-loop patterns based on risk, reversibility, confidence, and regulatory requirements, combining AI with deterministic systems where appropriate.
• Create shared AI foundations: Build reusable capabilities for orchestration, retrieval, knowledge representation, tool use, memory, structured outputs, evaluation, tracing, and feedback loops.
• Establish production and evaluation rigor: Define how Abby Care measures, monitors, and improves AI systems across quality, safety, reliability, latency, cost, and downstream operational outcomes.
• Build and lead the Applied AI function: Recruit and mentor engineers, set a high technical bar, embed AI engineers into domain teams, and remain hands-on in the most ambiguous and technically critical areas.

What Success Looks Like

• Absolutely clear, prioritized Applied AI strategy tied to measurable company and product outcomes.
• High-impact AI systems operating reliably in production and completing meaningful portions of end-to-end workflows.
• AI autonomy governed by explicit risk, confidence, and human-approval mechanisms.
• The organization has rigorous evaluation, monitoring, and feedback systems that make AI performance measurable and auditable.
• Domain teams can build on reusable AI primitives instead of repeatedly creating one-off solutions.
• Applied AI capabilities tightly integrated with Abby Care’s System of Record, product workflows, and operational processes.
• The Applied AI team attracts strong talent, operates with high technical standards, and becomes a force multiplier across the company.
• Absolutely increases operational throughput and quality without proportional growth in manual coordination or headcount.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, machine learning, or Applied AI, with significant experience building production systems.
• Demonstrated experience defining the architecture and leading the delivery of AI-powered products or platforms.
• Strong hands-on experience with modern language models, agent architectures, retrieval systems, tool use, structured outputs, and evaluation.
• Experience designing systems that operate over complex, incomplete, or unstructured real-world data.
• Strong software engineering and system-design fundamentals, including backend architecture, APIs, distributed systems, and data modeling.
• Experience establishing evaluation methodologies and production monitoring for probabilistic systems.
• Demonstrated ability to identify high-leverage problems and drive them from ambiguous problem definition through measurable outcomes.
• Experience providing technical leadership across teams and mentoring senior engineers.
• Strong product and operational judgment, including the ability to balance autonomy, reliability, speed, cost, and risk.

Skills

• Outstanding written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to align technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
• Must reside in or be willing to permanently relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area.
• Experience with model fine-tuning, post-training, reinforcement learning, synthetic data generation, knowledge graphs, ontologies, workflow engines, or state machines is preferred but not required.
• Experience in healthcare, fintech, insurance, or another regulated and operations-intensive environment is preferred but not required.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation packages that reflect the value you bring.
• Comprehensive health coverage that works for you.
• Generous paid time off.
• Financial savings benefits to support your future.
• Paid parental leave to support your growing family.

Automated Decision Tools

Absolutely Abby Care may use automated decision tools to help match and rank candidate work experience, education and skills found in online profiles, resumes and job applications against job requirements. We believe that these tools help ensure objective, data-based decisions during the hiring process, however, all Abby Care hiring decisions involve final human review and input. If you have questions or would like to request an alternative process, contact talent@abbycare.org.