Staff AI Engineer

This is OUR story... and YOUR next chapter

At HCA Healthcare, we are using AI and machine learning to improve how healthcare is delivered, operated, and continuously improved at enterprise scale. Our teams are helping improve clinical outcomes, reduce manual workload, and expand the reach of our care teams. If you're passionate about using technology to improve human life, this is where your work truly matters. 

What you will accomplish in this role

We are seeking a Staff AI Engineer who is a hands-on technical leader with deep expertise in Generative AI, Agentic AI, and modern software engineering. This role is focused on designing, building, and scaling production-grade AI applications that solve real business and clinical problems.

The ideal candidate has recent experience delivering production AI solutions used by enterprise users and excels at translating business needs into scalable AI architectures. They bring strong applied AI expertise, system design, and engineering leadership, with the ability to drive technical discovery, evaluate architectural trade-offs, and lead delivery from concept to production. 

What you will do in this role:

• Lead architectural decisions, mentor engineers, and establish engineering best practices for enterprise AI systems.
• Design, build, and maintain production-grade Generative AI, Agentic AI, and ML applications.
• Develop evaluation and safety infrastructure to measure model performance, surface regressions, and enforce enterprise-level trust and reliability.
• Apply LLMs, multimodal models, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), structured extraction, and tool calling for real-world healthcare workflows.
• Partner with Engineering, Product, Data, and Operations to integrate AI capabilities into HCA’s systems.
• Improve reliability, observability, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop review mechanisms for production AI systems.
• Stay close to frontier AI capabilities and apply them pragmatically to create business and operational leverage. 

What qualifications you will need:

• Bachelor's degree – Required
• Master's degree – Preferred
• 7+ years of software engineering, data science or related technical experience with at least 2 years of recent experience designing and delivering production-grade Generative AI solutions. – Required
• Hands-on experience with modern AI systems, including LLMs, RAG, agents, structured extraction, classification, or workflow automation. – Required
• Proficiency in Python, with experience building cloud-native applications on AWS or GCP and working with relational and/or NoSQL databases. – Required
• Practical experience with prompt engineering, tool use, retrieval, model selection, context management, and failure analysis. – Required
• Experience designing evaluation methodologies for AI systems, including quality metrics, test sets, human review loops, and error analysis. – Required
• Experience designing scalable retrieval architectures using vector databases, embeddings, semantic search, and hybrid search techniques for production AI systems. – Required
• High ownership, strong execution, and comfort operating in a fast-paced environment. – Required
• Familiarity with fine-tuning, parameter-efficient tuning, or multi-modal model integration. - Preferred
• Experience with multimodal AI, document intelligence, OCR, or structured information extraction. - Preferred
• Experience in healthcare, insurance, caregiving, or other regulated and operations-heavy domains. - Preferred
• Experience with human-in-the-loop systems, auditability, and quality assurance workflows. - Preferred
• Experience with knowledge graphs, ontologies, entity resolution, or structured knowledge representation. - Preferred

Work Location/Schedule:

• Remote (U.S. Only) - M-F, 8am – 5pm - Central Time

Travel Required:

• This job requires travel to Nashville, TN to attend final interview, 3-day New Hire Orientation, quarterly team meetings, and other travel on as-needed basis

Pay & Benefits:

• This position offers a Base Salary + Benefits (it does not offer an annual bonus or LTI)

Visa Sponsorship:

• Not offered, now or in the future

Virtual Interviews:

• All HCA Healthcare virtual interviews are conducted without the use of virtual backgrounds, background blurring, or any other visual distortion tools.

AI Usage Policy:

• The use of AI tools or prompts during any part of the interview is strictly prohibited. If it appears that you are reading from a script or using AI-generated responses, you will be eliminated from further consideration. We value authenticity and want to hear your own thoughts and experiences.

At HCA Healthcare, we are committed to fostering a culture of growth that allows you to build the career of a lifetime. We encourage you to apply for our Lead AI Engineer today. We review all applications promptly, and qualified candidates will be contacted to continue the process. Join us!

Bachelor's degree required, Master's preferred; 7+ years software engineering/data science with 2+ years production GenAI; Python, AWS/GCP, databases; RAG, LLMs, evaluation; no visa sponsorship; remote US only.

Key Responsibilities

• designing AI systems
• building production applications
• mentoring engineers

Skills & Tools

Python, AWS, GCP, LLMs, RAG

Job Details

• Category: Software Development
• Seniority: Senior Level
• Commitment: Full Time
• Workplace: Remote — United States
• Languages: English

About HCA Healthcare

A healthcare provider using AI and machine learning to improve clinical outcomes and operational efficiency. — Industry: Healthcare