Senior AI Engineer

About the Role

AI is the engine behind where Abacus is headed next — and this role sits at the controls. We're looking for someone who has been a tech lead before — someone who knows what it feels like to be the senior-most person in the room on a project, and who's comfortable both setting the technical direction and doing the hands-on design work personally when it counts. This role isn't purely about overseeing; you'll be initiating projects, personally designing systems and architecture, and then coordinating with other teams — data quality engineers, platform engineers, DevOps, product owners, and the business — to bring that design to life.

Mentorship is a real part of the job, but it's not a replacement for staying technical. You'll grow other engineers through code review, guidance, and coaching, while remaining deeply hands-on yourself — someone others come to because you can actually do the work, not just talk about it. You'll also serve as the liaison between technical capability and business need, helping product and business stakeholders understand what's feasible while making sure technical decisions stay grounded in real business priorities.

Your day to day

• Serve as the senior-most technical voice on projects you're part of, and act as the liaison between technical capability and business need — partnering with product managers and stakeholders to translate roadmap and customer priorities into technical direction, and translating technical realities back into terms the business side can plan around.
• Help shape the direction of our applied AI areas and intelligence features, driving deployment of state-of-the-art AI models and systems that directly impact Abacus's products and services (Abacus Agents, MCP, SQL and RAG agents and tools, and more).
• Develop novel data collection, fine-tuning, and LLM techniques, and design ML/AI pipelines for data preprocessing, feature engineering, model training, hyperparameter tuning, and evaluation — enabling rapid experimentation, iteration, and self-healing systems.
• Build scalable, reusable backend systems to support GenAI products company-wide, with robust logging, telemetry, and evaluation harnesses to ensure reliable performance.
• Shape and guide the work of other engineers on a project — setting technical direction and reviewing approach — and mentor and coach developers as an extension of that work, not a substitute for staying technically hands-on, helping others grow while keeping delivered solutions aligned with our architecture, coding standards, and policies.
• Participate in architectural discussions and influence key technical decisions, while identifying people and process improvements for Agile/Scrum teams where innovation and rapid iteration are critical to AI work.
• Balance delivery against roadmap commitments while navigating interruptions and client escalations, with a solid grasp of incident management, configuration management, and operational efficiency — communicating architecture and implementation objectives upward and keeping teams aligned with established policies.
• Represent Abacus credibly in customer-facing technical conversations, especially where business stakeholders need a trustworthy read on what's technically feasible.

What you bring to the team

• 3+ years of ML/AI engineering experience in high-velocity, high-growth companies (or equivalent ML/AI research background in academia), within 8+ years of overall software development experience.
• A track record of leading software development teams or projects toward production-grade systems supporting real customers, along with experience mentoring and growing engineers — setting technical direction, delegating effectively, and being a go-to resource other engineers seek out for guidance.
• A strong track record with language modeling technologies and GenAI — generative and embedding techniques, modern model architectures, fine-tuning/pre-training datasets, evaluation benchmarks, RAG, SQL agents, and similar — including strong, hands-on experience in at least one of agents/agentic workflows, MCP, or RAG, with working exposure to all three. This is the core technical bar for the role.
• Proficiency in Python, TensorFlow/PyTorch, and scalable ML/AI architecture. 
• Proven ability to drive end-to-end model and system development, from research and prototyping through deployment and monitoring.
• Strong coding and software engineering fundamentals — testing, code review, deployment best practices, QA, test automation, and Agile methodologies — along with experience designing scalable, distributed systems for data processing applications at the 10s–100s of TBs scale.
• Demonstrated knowledge of Cloud Architecture, AI Architecture, Agents/Agentic systems, Massive Parallel Processing (MPP) compute frameworks for Data+AI platforms, security, and MCP/API-based services, with enough breadth and depth to hold your own — and influence outcomes — in technical discussions with internal and external stakeholders.
• Solid understanding of roles adjacent to software development (product management, project management, client delivery, operations), the ability to work fluidly with each, and strong analytical and problem-solving instincts with a genuine passion for improving AI-driven user experiences.
• Bachelors Degree or equivalent relevant professional experience.

What we would like to see, but not required

• Experience with Databricks and Mosaic AI Gateway.
• Experience with Snowflake.
• Familiarity with FHIR.
• Exposure to healthcare data.
• Prior experience as a tech lead, team lead, or people manager for engineering staff.

Compensation

Compensation for this role is based on experience, skills, and location, and includes base salary plus eligibility for performance bonuses and equity grants.

What you'll get in return

• Unlimited paid time off — recharge when you need it.
• Work from anywhere — flexibility to fit your life.
• Comprehensive health coverage — multiple plan options to choose from.
• Equity for every employee — share in our success.
• Growth-focused environment — your development matters here.
• Home office setup allowance — one-time support to get you started.
• Monthly cell phone allowance — stay connected with ease.