Senior Applied AI Engineer

About Alaffia & Our Mission

Each year, the U.S. healthcare system suffers from over $500B in wasted spending due to medical billing fraud, waste, and administrative burden. At Alaffia, we’re committed to changing that paradigm. We’ve assembled a team of clinicians, AI engineers, and product experts to build advanced AI solutions that will directly bend the cost curve for all patients across the healthcare ecosystem. Collectively, we’re building best-in-class AI software to provide our customers with co-pilot tools, AI agents, and other cutting-edge solutions to reduce administrative burden and reduce healthcare costs. 

We’re a high-growth, venture-backed startup based in NYC and are actively scaling our company.

About the Role & What You’ll Be Doing

Alaffia is a healthcare AI startup revolutionizing health and data automation. Our AI-driven platform leverages state-of-the-art generative AI and machine learning technologies to enhance accuracy, efficiency, and compliance in medical billing and auditing. As we scale, we are seeking a Senior Applied AI Engineer to build the cutting-edge AI solutions, drive innovation, and shape the future of healthcare automation.

At Alaffia, AI is at the core of our mission. We are looking for a talented engineer who is passionate about building state-of-the-art AI models, deploying scalable AI-driven systems, and driving innovation in applied machine learning. Our AI technology powers intelligent automation for medical billing, ensuring accuracy, compliance, and operational efficiency. We seek someone who thrives on solving complex problems in generative AI, optimizing deep learning architectures, and applying reinforcement learning to real-world challenges. You will have the opportunity to fine-tune LLMs, design robust AI workflows, and implement scalable AI solutions that directly impact healthcare providers and payers. In this role, you’ll be shaping the future of AI-driven healthcare automation while tackling some of the toughest challenges in AI research and deployment.

Your Responsibilities

AI Fluency

• Deep understanding of a broad range of AI techniques, including deep learning, optimization, LLM fine-tuning, reinforcement learning (RLHF, DPO), data imbalance strategies, and ensemble learning.
• Expertise in NLP, OCR, and multi-modal AI solutions, with the ability to select the appropriate approach for each business problem.
• Strong awareness of the state-of-the-art AI research landscape, with the ability to evaluate and implement new methodologies effectively.
• Ability to conduct and present large-scale experiments using appropriate statistical methods and visualization techniques.
• Lead efforts in publishing technical white papers, blog posts, and company publications to establish thought leadership in AI.

AI System Design & Deployment

• Formulate business objectives as AI tasks, deriving system- and workflow-level solutions.
• Provide strong leadership in AI system design, ensuring model performance remains valid throughout its lifecycle.
• Familiarity with AI model training, tracking, and deployment tools such as MLflow, Weights & Biases, Hugging Face, LangChain, and CrewAI.
• Define experimentation strategies and refine AI system design based on empirical findings.

Code Fluency & Software Engineering Best Practices

• Write highly robust, scalable code that is flexible, reusable, and adaptable to evolving requirements.
• Ensure high code quality through rigorous code review processes and foster a collaborative engineering culture.
• Build tools and produce technical documentation to improve developer efficiency and alignment across teams.
• Proactively identify, resolve, and mitigate technical risks before deployments and releases.

What We’re Looking For:

• Experience in designing, developing, and deploying AI/ML models in a production environment. Preferred experience:
  • Experience with cloud provider, such as AWS, Azure, and GCP
  • Building and deploying user facing products with AI / ML
  • 5+ years industry experience with large scale system
  • Building AI / ML model in the healthcare sector
• Strong foundation in machine learning, deep learning, NLP, multi-modal, and generative AI technologies.
• Proficient in programming languages such as Python and frameworks/libraries like Langchain, and Hugging Face.
• Demonstrated ability to stay up to date with the latest AI research and methodologies.
• Exceptional problem-solving skills and the ability to work in a fast-paced, evolving environment.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.

Our Culture

At Alaffia, we fundamentally believe that the whole is more valuable than the sum of its individual parts. Further to that point, we believe a diverse team of individuals with various backgrounds, ideologies, and types of training generates the most value. Our people are entrepreneurial by nature, problem solvers, and are passionate about what they do — both inside and outside of the office.

What Else Do You Get Working With Us?

• Competitive compensation package (cash + equity)
• Medical, Dental and Vision benefits
• Flexible, paid vacation policy
• Work in a flat organizational structure — direct access to Leadership