Senior AI Engineer

Role Description

AI is the engine behind where Abacus is headed next — and this role sits at the controls. As a Senior AI Engineer, you'll help architect, build, and implement our AI platforms, working shoulder-to-shoulder with data quality engineers, data/software engineers, platform engineers, DevOps, product owners, and the business. You'll provide technical leadership across multiple, geographically distributed teams, coaching them toward future success, and you'll partner directly with engineering leadership on strategic initiatives that determine how we scale AI across the organization.

This is a build-and-lead role in equal measure: you'll be hands-on with the models, pipelines, and agentic systems that power products like Abacus Agents, and you'll be the person teams look to for direction, mentorship, and architectural judgment as we push further into applied AI.

Your day to day

• Help shape the direction of our applied AI areas and intelligence features, driving deployment of state-of-the-art AI models and systems that directly impact Abacus's products and services (Abacus Agents, MCP, SQL and RAG agents and tools, and more).
• Develop novel data collection, fine-tuning, and LLM techniques that achieve optimal performance on specific tasks and domains.
• Design and implement ML/AI pipelines for data preprocessing, feature engineering, model training, hyperparameter tuning, and evaluation — enabling rapid experimentation, iteration, and self-healing systems.
• Build scalable, reusable backend systems to support GenAI products company-wide, with robust logging, telemetry, and evaluation harnesses to ensure reliable performance.
• Partner with cross-functional teams — AI engineers, data engineers, and product — to deliver AI solutions that meaningfully improve user productivity and satisfaction.
• Drive critical initiatives spanning AI and data engineering innovation, development productivity, and benchmarking.
• Mentor and coach software and AI developers, helping them grow their skills and ensuring delivered solutions align with our architecture strategy, coding standards, and organizational policies.
• Participate in architectural discussions, influence key technical decisions, and collaborate with peers to keep the organization's engineering approach consistent.
• Identify people and process improvements for Agile/Scrum teams, especially where innovation and rapid iteration are critical to AI work.
• Balance delivery against roadmap commitments while navigating interruptions and client escalations, with a solid grasp of incident management, configuration management, and operational efficiency.
• Communicate architecture, design, and implementation objectives upward, and keep teams aligned with established policies and procedures.
• Represent Abacus credibly in customer-facing technical conversations.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of ML/AI engineering experience in high-velocity, high-growth companies (a strong background in relevant ML/AI research in academia will also be considered).
• 6+ years of experience as a software developer at some point in your career.
• 2+ years of experience with Databricks, Mosaic AI Gateway, and associated technologies in the Databricks stack for data and AI engineering.
• A strong track record with language modeling technologies and GenAI — generative and embedding techniques, modern model architectures, fine-tuning/pre-training datasets, evaluation benchmarks, agents and agentic workflows (orchestration, workflow management, observability, debugging), RAG, SQL agents, MCP, and similar.
• Proficiency in Python, TensorFlow/PyTorch, and scalable ML/AI architecture.
• Proven ability to drive end-to-end model and system development, from research and prototyping through deployment and monitoring.
• Strong coding and software engineering fundamentals, with familiarity with testing, code review, and deployment best practices.
• Experience designing scalable, distributed systems for data processing applications and services at the 10s–100s of TBs scale.
• A track record of leading software development teams or projects toward production-grade systems supporting real customers.
• Excellent knowledge of software development design, QA, test automation, and Agile methodologies.
• Demonstrated knowledge of Cloud Architecture, AI Architecture, Agents/Agentic systems, Massive Parallel Processing (MPP) compute frameworks for Data+AI platforms, security, and MCP/API-based services.
• Enough breadth and depth in software and AI development to hold your own — and influence outcomes — in technical discussions with internal and external stakeholders.
• Solid understanding of roles adjacent to software development (product management, project management, client delivery, operations) and the ability to work fluidly with each.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving instincts, with a genuine passion for improving AI-driven user experiences.
• Bachelors Degree or equivalent relevant professional experience.

Requirements

• Experience with Snowflake.
• Familiarity with FHIR.
• Exposure to healthcare data.

Benefits

• Unlimited paid time off — recharge when you need it.
• Work from anywhere — flexibility to fit your life.
• Comprehensive health coverage — multiple plan options to choose from.
• Equity for every employee — share in our success.
• Growth-focused environment — your development matters here.
• Home office setup allowance — one-time support to get you started.
• Monthly cell phone allowance — stay connected with ease.

Company Description

As a mission-led technology company helping to drive better healthcare outcomes, Abacus Insights believes that the best innovation and value we can bring to our customers comes from diverse ideas, thoughts, experiences, and perspectives. Therefore, we dedicate resources to building diverse teams and providing equal employment opportunities to all applicants. Abacus prohibits discrimination and harassment regarding race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws.

At the heart of who we are is a commitment to continuously and intentionally building an inclusive culture—one that empowers every team member across the globe to do their best work and bring their authentic selves. We carry that same commitment into our hiring process, aiming to create an interview experience where you feel comfortable and confident showcasing your strengths. If there’s anything we can do to support that—big or small—please let us know.