Principal Applied AI Engineer

Description We’re looking for a lead engineer who can take Vi ’s AI agent capabilities and make them work in production healthcare environments. You’ll build and ship AI systems for clients — owning everything from data ingestion and CRM integration to real-time agent infrastructure and HIPAA-compliant delivery. This is a client-facing role: you work closely with enterprise customers to understand their workflows, then you build AI orchestrated workflows that automate them. You’re comfortable with databases, data pipelines, AI/ML tooling, agent configuration, and the messy realities of integrating with healthcare data systems. You ship fast, you think in products, and you don’t wait for specs. Key Responsibilities - Build and deploy AI-powered voice and messaging agents for healthcare and life sciences clients, end-to-end. - Translate client workflows into real agent workflow design. Run technical sessions with clients' clinical, IT, and ops teams; converting needs into prompts, tools, retrieval shapes, and vector stores. - Integrate with client data systems including CRMs, EHR/EMR platforms, specialty pharmacy systems, claims and Rx data feeds and build the ingestion pipelines to support them. - Write the production stack in TypeScript - agent runtime, routing, orchestration, evals; help build out the ML side in Python (training, embeddings, model registry); compose declarative guardrails & integrations within workflows. - Engineer within HIPAA constraints: real-time API access to PHI (never stored at rest), de-identification pipelines, US-only data residency, encrypted recordings. - Design and maintain databases (relational and caching layers) that support both real-time agent operations and compliance audit trails. - Implement output guardrails ensuring agents remain informational and compliant with healthcare regulatory requirements. - Codify per-client configuration patterns into reusable components so each new client onboards faster than the last. - Collaborate with product, account management, and platform engineering to translate field learnings into platform improvements. What We’re Looking For - 7+ years in a production engineering role shipping customer-facing software. Solutions engineering or consulting backgrounds qualify if you were writing and deploying production code, not just scoping it. - Fluency in modern programming languages (Javascript/Node, Typescript, Python, etc) - Experience building and operating real-time systems: WebSockets, streaming media, event-driven architectures, or high-throughput API services. - Production integration work with CRM platforms (Salesforce, HubSpot, or similar), healthcare data systems (EHR/EMR, claims, pharmacy), or data warehouse/lake connectors (Snowflake, Databricks, S3). - Have built retrieval and ingestion paths that feed agents reliable context with correct guardrails & caching in place. - Working knowledge of data engineering patterns: ETL/ELT pipelines, data quality checks, ingestion from heterogeneous sources. - Comfort with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP): containers, CI/CD, monitoring, and basic security practices. - Ability to work within HIPAA-regulated environments. You don’t need to be a compliance expert, but you understand why certain data can’t be logged and how to build systems that enforce it. - Strong client-facing communication: you can run a technical working session with a customer’s IT team and translate what you learn into engineering decisions. - Startup disposition: you build, you ship, you fix what breaks. Low ego, high agency. Nice to Have - Voice or telephony infrastructure experience: building or operating real-time call systems at scale. - LLM orchestration and agentic system design: prompt engineering, function calling, structured output, guardrails. - Healthcare or life sciences domain knowledge: patient services, specialty pharmacy, clinical operations, health plan operations. - Experience with workflow engi