Senior AI/ML Backend Engineer

Role Description

We are looking for an experienced Senior AI/ML Backend Engineer who is eager to build the backend services for our AI/ML product features that make a significant impact within the organization. The ideal candidate will be enthusiastic about taking ownership of their work and spearheading cross-functional projects.

Lyra is for you if you:

• Thrive on working with brilliant teammates to solve complex, meaningful problems
• Are passionate about making a social impact and supporting people at their most challenging moments
• Enjoy cross-functional collaboration with therapists, data scientists, engineers, and product managers

In this role, you will:

• Be part of a team working on building our machine learning and generative AI backend services that will support the many ML/AI product features.
• Create the necessary backend infrastructure to enable scalable, resilient, and highly performant solutions
• Deploy and manage various applications in production
• And of course, you will be coding every day!

Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience delivering production-ready products
• Ability to write high-quality code in Python
• Experience with modern async Python web frameworks (e.g., FastAPI) and handling data streaming (WebSockets, Server-Sent Events)
• Experience working with Docker and deploying applications to Kubernetes
• Experience with relational and low-latency databases
• Experience integrating RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) into AI features
• Experience building generative AI chatbots
• Experience with LLM observability and monitoring tools (e.g., Langfuse) to track latency, token usage, and output quality
• Familiarity with LLM orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex) and integrating with foundation model APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock)
• A desire to learn new technologies quickly
• A love of building systems from scratch
• A thoughtful approach to balancing quality and deadlines in fast-paced settings
• Excellent communication skills with a talent for building consensus and alignment
• Strong organizational skills and the ability to distill complex problems into clear priorities that move the team and business forward

Requirements

• Nice to haves:
• Experience setting up and maintaining vector databases
• Experience working with Celery
• Experience defining and using Protobuf messages
• Experience writing production code in Java/Kotlin
• Experience building solutions on cloud infrastructure, particularly AWS
• Experience working with highly sensitive data in a healthcare environment

Benefits

• Comprehensive healthcare coverage (including medical, dental, vision, FSA/HSA, life and disability insurances)
• Lyra for Lyrians; coaching and therapy services
• Equity in the company through discretionary restricted stock units
• Competitive time off with pay policies including vacation, sick days, and company holidays
• Paid parental leave
• 401K with up to 3% matching
• Monthly tech allowance
• We like to spread joy throughout the year with well-being perks and activities, surprise swag, regular community celebration…and more!