## About the Role
Vida Health is seeking a Principal AI/ML Engineering Lead to help build and scale the data, infrastructure, and AI/ML platform supporting its healthcare technology.
Vida is rebuilding its data platform with a strong focus on protecting patient data, governing data access and sharing, enabling self-serve analytics, and supporting production AI/ML capabilities. In this hands-on engineering role, you will work across software engineering, data engineering, infrastructure, DevOps, security, and AI/ML to establish a platform where advanced capabilities can be developed and deployed safely and efficiently.
You will collaborate with platform, security, IT, and DevOps teams while helping establish technical patterns that support scalable AI/ML systems and protect protected health information (PHI).
## Key Responsibilities
### Data & Platform Engineering
Contribute to the development of the data and technology platform across:
Data ingestion
Data transformation
Canonical data modeling
Entity resolution
Event backbone
Configuration as code
API and serving layers
Help establish scalable and reliable foundations for AI/ML and data-driven applications.
### DevOps & Platform Reliability
Strengthen DevOps and production reliability across the technology platform.
Develop and maintain CI/CD workflows.
Implement and manage infrastructure as code.
Support environment management and deployment processes.
Build observability across metrics, logs, traces, and service-level objectives (SLOs).
Help maintain reliable production infrastructure for AI/ML and data workloads.
### Security & Data Protection
Partner with Security and IT teams to strengthen platform security.
Support data classification and access-control enforcement.
Implement secure secrets and key management.
Maintain controls aligned with HIPAA and HITRUST.
Keep protected health information (PHI) within controlled security boundaries.
Favor in-VPC or local inference where required.
Ensure AI/ML implementations do not introduce pathways for sensitive data leakage.
### AI/ML Platform Engineering
Build the foundation for Vida's AI/ML platform.
Develop model serving and inference gateway capabilities.
Build feature and training data pipelines.
Support the complete machine learning lifecycle, including:
Model registry
Model evaluation
Model deployment
Model monitoring
Integrate LLM applications with grounding and guardrails.
Support retrieval, evaluation, and knowledge-graph-based AI applications.
Integrate AI/ML models into real-world production applications.
### Technical Leadership
Work alongside existing team leads to increase AI/ML fluency across platform, security, and DevOps teams.
Establish technical patterns and engineering practices that other teams can build upon.
Work effectively across backend, infrastructure, data, and AI/ML systems.
Take on additional responsibilities as needed.
## Required Qualifications
Bachelor's degree at a minimum.
7–10+ years of experience building and scaling production-grade AI, machine learning, or ML systems.
Demonstrated experience as a generalist Software Engineer across backend engineering, infrastructure, and data.
Substantial hands-on experience building and deploying AI/ML systems in production.
Experience with
MLOps
Model serving
Inference infrastructure
Feature pipelines
Data pipelines
Production model integration
Strong cloud engineering experience, ideally with Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Experience with GCP technologies such as:
Vertex AI
BigQuery
Cloud Run
Pub/Sub
Cloud SQL
GKE
AWS or Azure equivalents are also welcome.
Strong DevOps and reliability engineering skills.
Experience with:
CI/CD
Terraform or similar infrastructure-as-code tools
Containers
Kubernetes
Production observability
Strong data engineering skills, including:
SQL
Pipeline tooling such as dbt
Data warehousing
Security-focused mindset and comfort working with sensitive data in regulated environments.
Experience with LLM applications, including:
Retrieval
Evaluation
Guardrails
Knowledge graphs
Comfortable working with ambiguity and moving quickly from technical concepts to production solutions.
Ability to go deep in one technical area while working effectively across the broader technology stack.
## Preferred Qualifications
Experience with entity resolution or master data management (MDM).
Experience in healthcare or another regulated data domain.
Experience with GraphQL or a federated serving layer.
Experience with privacy-enhancing technologies.
Familiarity with HIPAA or HITRUST.
## Core Technical Skills
AI/ML Engineering
Machine Learning
MLOps
Model Serving
Inference Infrastructure
LLM Applications
Retrieval
AI Evaluation
AI Guardrails
Knowledge Graphs
Feature Engineering
Data Pipelines
Data Engineering
SQL dbt
Data Warehousing
Backend Software Engineering
GCP / Google Cloud
Vertex AI
BigQuery
Cloud Run
Pub/Sub
Cloud SQL
GKE
AWS
Azure
Terraform
Kubernetes
Containers
CI/CD
Infrastructure as Code
Production Observability
Data Security
HIPAA
HITRUST
Entity Resolution
Master Data Management
GraphQL
Privacy-Enhancing Technologies
## Work Arrangement
Remote
Location listed: Baton Rouge, LA, US
Vida employees must reside in and be able to work from the United States.
International work is prohibited.
Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S.
Vida is unable to sponsor work visas.
Eligibility is also subject to whether Vida is authorized to conduct business in the applicant's state.
## Compensation
$250,000–$275,000 per year
## About Vida Health
Vida Health is a virtual, personalized healthcare provider focused on helping people manage obesity and related conditions including diabetes, high blood pressure, anxiety, and depression.
Vida combines advanced technology with healthcare professionals, including Obesity Medicine-Certified Physicians, Registered Dietitians, Expert Coaches, and Licensed Therapists, to provide whole-person care.
The company works with Fortune 100 companies, national payers, and large healthcare providers to help people improve their health.
## Equal Employment Opportunity
Vida is an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer.
Vida states that qualified applicants receive consideration without regard to race, color, ancestry, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status, consistent with applicable law.
Vida also considers qualified applicants with criminal histories in accordance with applicable federal, state, and local law and provides reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans during the application process.
## Hiring Process & AI Use
Vida may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of its hiring process, including reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, assessing responses, and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials.
These tools assist the recruiting team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are made by humans.
## Apply Now
If you are a senior AI/ML Engineering leader and hands-on Software Engineer with experience building production AI/ML systems, data platforms, cloud infrastructure, MLOps, DevOps, and secure applications in regulated environments, apply now for the Principal AI/ML Engineering Lead opportunity.