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About This Role
About Lyra Health
Lyra Health is a leading provider of evidence\-based mental health care, serving more than 20 million people globally in partnership with employers and more than 100 million through health plan and partner relationships. The company has delivered more than 15 million sessions of mental health care, published more than 35 peer\-reviewed studies, and delivered unmatched outcomes in terms of access, clinical effectiveness, and cost efficiency. Extensive peer\-reviewed research confirms Lyra’s transformative care model helps people recover twice as fast and results in a 26% annual reduction in overall healthcare claims costs. Lyra is transforming access to life\-changing mental health care through Lyra Empower, the only fully integrated, AI\-powered platform combining the highest\-quality care and technology solutions.
About the Role
We are seeking a Staff ML/AI Engineer to define and drive the architectural vision for Lyra’s machine learning and generative AI technology landscape. In this role, you will serve as a technical anchor across the engineering and data organizations—architecting enterprise\-scale AI platforms, setting technical strategy for high\-impact AI/ML initiatives, and ensuring our AI products operate with top\-tier reliability, security, and medical precision.
The ideal candidate is a seasoned technical leader who excels at translating complex healthcare challenges into scalable platform solutions, building consensus across cross\-functional leadership, and elevating the technical bar for the entire engineering organization.
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 physicians, therapists, data scientists, data analysts and product managers
### Responsibilities
- Drive AI Platform Architecture: Design and execute the long\-term roadmap for Lyra’s machine learning and generative AI platform, enabling fast, safe, and reliable deployment of frontier models across the company.
- Lead AI Infrastructure Vision: Architect end\-to\-end training, fine\-tuning, and low\-latency inference platforms, including centralized RAG architecture, vector databases, and enterprise evaluation/guardrail frameworks.
- Set Engineering Excellence Standards: Establish organizational standards for the full AI/ML SDLC—from dataset lineage and CI/CD pipelines to automated model evaluation, red\-teaming, and production monitoring.
- Cross\-Functional Technical Leadership: Partner closely with Product Management, Data Science, Security, and Clinical leaders to translate strategic clinical goals into foundational AI capability roadmaps.
- Mentor and Multiply Impact: Elevate the engineering culture by mentoring Senior ML Engineers, conducting high\-leverage architectural reviews, and establishing engineering best practices across teams.
- Hands\-On Leadership: Lead by example through technical prototypes, critical\-path architecture, and strategic coding contributions.
- And of course, you will be coding!
### Qualifications
- 8\+ years of experience deploying complex ML/AI solutions into mission\-critical production environments, with a proven track record of technical leadership.
- Deep System \& Software Engineering Expertise: Mastery of Python, RESTful API design, Protobuf, and microservices architecture.
- Production AI/ML Infrastructure Mastery: Deep expertise with Docker, Kubernetes, container orchestration, and real\-time inference services.
- Modern Generative AI Architecture: Hands\-on experience designing and deploying RAG pipelines, fine\-tuning LLMs, managing vector databases, and building robust LLM evaluation/guardrail frameworks.
- Data Layer Systems: Expertise with relational databases, low\-latency key\-value stores, distributed queueing system architectures (e.g., Celery, Kafka), and data pipeline orchestration.
- Cloud Architecture: Strong experience architecting cloud\-native solutions on AWS (or equivalent cloud providers).
- Strategic Communication: Exceptional ability to distill highly ambiguous technical problems into clear strategic priorities and influence leadership across engineering, product, and business domain disciplines.
### Preferred Qualifications
- Polyglot Engineering Background: Experience writing high\-performance production code in Java or Kotlin.
- Healthcare \& Sensitive Data Expertise: Experience architecting AI/ML systems within highly regulated environments (HIPAA compliance, SOC2, handling PHI/PII).
- MLOps / Platform Productization: Experience building internal developer platforms or ML tooling used by dozens of data scientists and engineers.
As a full\-time Staff ML Engineer, you will be employed by Lyra Health, Inc. The anticipated annual base salary range for this full\-time position is $161,000 to $221,500\. The base range is determined by role and level, and placement within the range will depend on a number of job\-related factors, including but not limited to your skills, qualifications, experience and location. This role may also be eligible for discretionary bonuses.
Annual salary is only one part of an employee’s total compensation package at Lyra. We also offer generous benefits that include:
- 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!
We can’t wait to meet you.
"We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age, disability, genetic information or any other category protected by law.
By applying for this position, you acknowledge that your personal information will be processed as per the Lyra Health Workforce Privacy Notice. Through this application, to the extent permitted by law, we will collect personal information from you including, but not limited to, your name, email address, gender identity, employment information, and phone number for the purposes of recruiting and assessing suitability, aptitude, skills, qualifications, and interests for employment with Lyra. We may also collect information about your race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, which is considered sensitive personal information under the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) and special category data under the UK and EU GDPR. Providing this information is optional and completely voluntary, and if you provide it you consent to Lyra processing it for the purposes as described at the point of collection, for example for diversity and inclusion initiatives. If you are a California resident and would like to limit how we use this information, please use the Limit the Use of My Sensitive Personal Information form. This information will only be retained for as long as needed to fulfill the purposes for which it was collected, as described above. Please note that Lyra does not “sell” or “share” personal information as defined by the CPRA. Outside of the United States, for example in the EU, Switzerland and the UK, you may have the right to request access to, or a copy of, your personal information, including in a portable format; request that we delete your information from our systems; object to or restrict processing of your information; or correct inaccurate or outdated personal information in our systems. These rights may be subject to legal limitations. To exercise your data privacy rights outside of the United States, please contact [email protected]. For more information about how we use and retain your information, please see our Workforce Privacy Notice."
We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, summarizing interviews, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.
Salary Context
This $161K-$221K range is above the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $175K across 2162 roles with salary data).
View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →Role Details
About This Role
AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.
Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.
Across the 4,317 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 70% of the market. At Lyra Health, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
Skills Required
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.
Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $214,900 based on 6,420 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $227,400. This role's midpoint ($191K) sits 11% below the category median. Disclosed range: $161K to $221K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $215,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $266,300. The 90th percentile reaches $320,790. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($287,500) and Research Engineer ($272,100). By seniority level: Entry: $110,000; Mid: $194,400; Senior: $227,400; Director: $274,554; VP: $241,000.
Lyra Health AI Hiring
Lyra Health has 5 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across MLOps Engineer, AI/ML Engineer, Data Scientist. Based in Remote, US. Compensation range: $197K - $221K.
Remote Work Context
Remote AI roles pay a median of $180,000 across 1,196 positions. About 15% of all AI roles offer remote work.
Career Path
Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.
The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.
What to Expect in Interviews
Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.
When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 4,317 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 138 entry-level, 2,071 mid-level, 1,655 senior, and 453 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 15% of the market (635 positions). The remaining 3,657 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $215,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $266,300. The 90th percentile reaches $320,790. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($287,500 median, 34 roles); Research Engineer ($272,100 median, 227 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($244,000 median, 23 roles).
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 4,317 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (3,004), Data Scientist (345), AI Software Engineer (309). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (138) are outnumbered by mid-level (2,071) and senior (1,655) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 453 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 15% of all AI roles (635 positions), with 3,657 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $215,000. Top-quartile roles start at $266,300, and the 90th percentile reaches $320,790. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Safety roles lead at $287,500 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $145,000. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (2,249 postings), Aws (1,224 postings), Azure (938 postings), Rag (915 postings), Gcp (660 postings), Pytorch (640 postings), Prompt Engineering (624 postings), Kubernetes (559 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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