AI Engineer( Austin based)

Autonomize AI is an enterprise intelligence platform transforming how healthcare organizations access, orchestrate, and act on complex operational and clinical knowledge. Recognized as a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer 2026, a Top 100 company on the Inc. 5000, and trusted by three of the five largest U.S. health enterprises, Autonomize AI combines healthcare-specific AI agents, workflow intelligence, and deep domain expertise to enable smarter decision-making across utilization management, care management, claims, pharmacy, and appeals. Backed by Valtruis, Asset Management Ventures, Cigna Group Ventures, ATX Venture Partners, and others. We're building the critical infrastructure for AI-native healthcare operations. We're growing fast and looking for bold, driven teammates to join us.

The Opportunity

We're looking for a hands-on AI Engineer who's excited to ship real-world applications, not just benchmarks. You'll build and optimize the AI-native systems behind our healthcare agents and copilots, blending LLMs, vision models, and classical ML across structured and unstructured data to power decisions in high-stakes workflows. This role is for someone ready to go deep on applied problems, from retrieval to routing to generation, and push solutions into production fast.

What You'll Do

• Build production AI pipelines. Own and optimize pipelines that combine LLMs and classical ML (RAG, extraction, scoring, summarization, classification) for utilization management, payment integrity, claims, and appeals.
• Extract from real-world documents. Implement VLM- and OCR-based pipelines that turn medical documents, faxes, and healthcare forms into structured, reliable data.
• Fine-tune and adapt models. Run SFT and parameter-efficient (e.g., LoRA) fine-tuning experiments on open-source and proprietary models.
• Implement retrieval and agents. Build retrieval strategies, prompt chains, tool-using agents, and inference orchestration (e.g., LangGraph) for production use cases.
• Build evals and analyze errors. Create eval harnesses and test sets, run error analysis, and turn findings into measurable accuracy gains.
• Monitor and improve. Track and improve model quality, latency, cost, explainability, and safety in production.
• Experiment fast. Prototype new techniques from recent research and help decide what's ready for production.
• Collaborate. Work closely with senior MLEs, product, engineering, and domain experts, and document your work clearly.

Qualifications

• 2+ years experience working in applied ML and LLMs.
• Strong Python skills and familiarity with PyTorch , Hugging Face Transformers, and LLM frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex).
• Comfort with embeddings, vector search, retrieval pipelines, and prompt engineering .
• Experience fine-tuning or adapting models , plus working knowledge of classical ML and NLP.
• Understanding of model evaluation , observability, and responsible AI practices.
• Experience deploying models to production and familiarity with MLOps tooling (MLflow, Docker, Kubernetes).
• Solid software engineering fundamentals and clean, testable code.
• A bias for experimentation, clarity, and shipping fast.
• Experience with healthcare, compliance-sensitive data, or regulated environments.
• A BS/MS in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or a related field , or equivalent experience.

Nice to Have

• Experience with VLMs or document AI.
• Exposure to healthcare payer workflows (UM, claims, prior authorization, medical coding).
• Experience with agent frameworks or multi-step reasoning systems.
• Open-source contributions, side projects, or technical writing.

Who You Are

• Owner mentality. The buck stops with you. You own it, you learn it, and you get it done.
• Naturally curious. You'd rather experiment than hypothesize. You push boundaries and experiment your way through any problem.
• Passionate and unafraid. You're committed to the team and the mission.
• A team player. You love to learn and win together.
• A strong communicator. You're clear in voice, writing, chat, and video.

What We Offer

• Real-world impact. Your models run in production at some of the largest U.S. health enterprises, shaping decisions in prior authorization, claims, and appeals.
• Category-defining AI products. Help build the AI operating layer for healthcare, a space where the playbook is still being written.
• Hard, unsolved ML problems. Work on VLM document understanding over messy real-world faxes, agentic reasoning over clinical policy, domain fine-tuning (SFT, LoRA, RL), and models that learn from expert feedback in production.
• Research to production, fast. Read the paper, prototype it, ship it. New ideas reach customers in weeks, not quarters.
• Significant ownership and autonomy. Help shape AI strategy, not just execute it.
• Modern stack and compute. You'll have GPU resources and access to the latest open-source and frontier models.
• Build your public profile. Publish papers, file patents, write for our tech blog, and speak at conferences.
• Learn with strong peers. Grow through design reviews, paper discussions, and close collaboration with ML engineers and clinical experts.
• A high-growth environment with exceptional technical challenges.
• Competitive compensation with performance incentives.
• 100% employer-paid health, vision, and dental insurance.
• Retirement plans (401k) , disability insurance, and employee assistance programs.