AI Engineering Lead

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable qualified individuals with disabilities to perform the essential duties.

This job description is a summary of the primary duties and responsibilities of the job and position. It is not intended to be a comprehensive or all-inclusive listing of duties and responsibilities. Contents are subject to change at the company’s discretion.

Education

• Required - Bachelor's Computer Science, Machine Learning, Data Science, or related field; equivalent experience may be considered in lieu of a degree.
• Preferred - Master's

• Required - 8 years Software/ML engineering experience, including hands-on experience productionizing machine-learning or conversational AI systems with a minimum of 3 years in technical leadership or team-lead capacity
• Preferred - Experience I healthcare or another regulated, HIPAA-relevant environment strongly preferred.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with LLM and generative AI applications — RAG, prompting, evaluation, and fine-tuning
• Experience designing and operating systems in AWS (SageMaker, Bedrock) or a comparable cloud
• Strong SQL and experience with modern data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, or similar)
• Experience with MLOps tooling, CI/CD, and infrastructure automation
• Demonstrated track record of quantifying business impact from AI investments

• Deep knowledge of machine learning, natural language processing, and conversational AI (including retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, and large, language model-based systems); strong experience with cloud platforms, MLOps tooling, containers, and CI/CD.
• Strategic planning and roadmap translation into engineering execution.
• System design for scalability, performance, and reliability.
• Decision-making under ambiguity in emerging AI technologies.

• Establishes AI/ML engineering vision, operating model, and technical standards (coding, testing, security, observability) for the conversational AI platform.
• Translates product and business roadmaps into multi-quarter engineering plans, milestones, staffing models, and budgets.
• Directs development across data ingestion, feature computation, labeling, training, evaluation, packaging, deployment, and inference.
• Implements model lifecycle management and governance, including reproducibility, experiment tracking, versioning, approvals, and rollback.
• Experiment tracking, versioning, approvals, and rollback.
• Builds and scales feature stores, model registries, and training/inference platforms, optimizing for cost, latency, throughput, and reliability service-level agreements (SLAs).
• Collaborates with Product, Risk, Legal, and Compliance to document model intent, limitations, and human-in-the-loop mechanisms, and to prepare artifacts for audit in a HIPAA-regulated setting.
• Leads incident response for model and service regressions, and mentor staff and develop hiring and career paths for AI/ML engineering roles.
• Performs other duties as assigned
• Complies with all policies and standards

Interpersonal Skills

• Translates technical concepts into business language for non-technical executives
• Strong stakeholder management and cross-functional influence
• High ownership; operates well with ambiguity and shifting priorities
• Committed to developing people and building a durable team
• Sound judgment on when to ship, when to iterate, and when to stop

Ochsner Health does not consider an individual an applicant until they have formally applied to the open position on this careers website.

Please refer to the job description to determine whether the position you are interested in is remote or on-site. Individuals who reside in and will work from the following areas are not eligible for remote work position: Colorado, California, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, Washington, and Washington D.C.

Ochsner Health endeavors to make our site accessible to all users.  If you would like to contact us regarding the accessibility of our website, or if you need an accommodation to complete the application process, please contact our HR Employee Solution Center at 504-842-4748 (select option 1) or careers@ochsner.org. This contact information is for accommodation requests only and cannot be used to inquire about the status of applications.

Ochsner is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to any legally protected class, including protected veterans and individuals with disabilities.