Join us as we work to create a thriving ecosystem that delivers accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all.

athenahealth is seeking a visionary Lead AI/ML Engineer to design, develop, and deploy advanced AI and ML solutions that enable athenahealth to deliver accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all.

As a multi-hat contributor, you bring a blend of data engineering, software engineering, and leadership.  Your primary responsibility will be designing, implementing, deploying, and maintaining ML solutions for a mix of features across multiple product areas.  Experience building, deploying, and maintaining ML systems is required, and familiarity with Generative AI, agentic AI, and the tooling to deploy these solutions in production software is highly desirable.

Beyond model work, you will serve as an advisor, advocate, and trusted partner within our subdivision: consulting with teams on their AI/ML approaches, evangelizing concepts across the organization, and helping shape our AI strategy through thought leadership in this dynamic field.

As an experienced leader in this space, you will have a high degree of autonomy in your work while collaborating closely with product managers, analysts, and engineers to responsibly and efficiently operationalize cutting-edge AI technologies.

The Team

Within our Patient Experience sub-division, we offer patients seamless access to their health records through our innovative athenaPatient mobile application and accessible web-based patient portal. We break down barriers by connecting patients to their providers through cutting-edge solutions. Additionally, we enhance care coordination by assisting patients in selecting the most suitable health provider referral based on factors such as costs, outcomes, and schedule availability.

In short, Patient Experience teams exist to make every patient’s digital touch-point—portal, mobile app, self-check-in, payments, scheduling, messaging—simple, trusted, and highly available, while delivering measurable value back to providers and their network.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end AI/ML projects—from research and design to deployment and ongoing maintenance—ensuring scalable, production-ready systems

• Design and implement robust ML pipelines and production-grade infrastructure to support high-volume workloads

• Partner with cross-functional teams to integrate AI capabilities aligned with business goals and customer needs

• Research and prototype novel AI/ML algorithms and techniques to drive innovation.

• Mentor engineers and foster a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, and continuous learning

• Establish and enforce best practices for AI/ML development, deployment, monitoring, and governance

• Monitor model performance, scalability, and cost in production, and drive continuous optimization

• Advocate for responsible AI—focusing on fairness, transparency, and data privacy

• Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders; contribute to the AI strategy and long-term technology direction

Required qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Data Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Computer Science/Engineering, or a related technical field

• 6+ years in technology or software development, with at least 3 years specializing in ML/AI, analytics, or data science roles

• Extensive experience with ML frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch, SageMaker) and hands-on model development

• Proficiency in Python; working knowledge of Java; strong SQL; experience building data pipelines and APIs to connect web apps to data and ML models

• Proven track record designing, developing, and deploying scalable ML/AI systems in production

• Strong understanding of ML algorithms, deep learning, NLP, and statistical modeling

• Experience with LLMs, generative AI, agentic AI, and related tooling; ability to compare these with traditional ML approaches

• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills; experience leading cross-functional teams

• Passion for staying current with AI research and applying novel techniques responsibly in production

• Understanding of ethics, fairness, and compliance implications of AI; ability to lead associated initiatives

• Ability to influence technical strategy and mentor engineers at various levels

Preferred qualifications

• Advanced degree (Master’s or PhD) in Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning, or related field

• 8+ years in technology or software development, with at least 4