Lead Foundational Models Machine Learning Engineer

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

RESEARCHER – FOUNDATIONAL MODELS

We are looking for a Lead Foundational Models Machine Learning Engineer to join the Research team in the Core AI Subdivision. You will work with the team to evaluate, compare, and provide expert guidance on the application of commercial and open-source foundational models across athenahealth’s products, offerings, and processes.

About you: 

You love to own important work and find it difficult to turn down a good challenge. You are excited about the latest developments in AI & ML and keep abreast of the latest models, methods, and technologies. You have experience building, tuning, evaluating, and deploying ML models at scale. You have strong communication skills and love working with colleagues from a variety of technical and non-technical backgrounds. You enjoy both learning and teaching, and you are excited to share your expertise across the company. You love collaboration and working closely with a team of other experts and with technical and non-technical stakeholders. Finally, you have a strong interest in improving the delivery of healthcare. 

About the team: 

The Core AI Subdivision is bringing Artificial Intelligence to bear against the hardest problems in healthcare.  We are working with product and engineering leaders across the company to build AI into our Best In KLAS suite of products. We work together with athenahealth engineers to deploy state-of-the-art machine learning models and agents.  

Job Responsibilities:

As a member of the Research team focusing on foundational models, you provide subject matter expertise, practical technical guidance, and tooling as needed on the capabilities of leading commercial and open source foundational, pretrained models.  Your guidance includes such dimensions as:

• Supported modalities for input and output e.g., text, image, audio, video.

• Reasoning capabilities

• Broad performance based on industry benchmarks and any athena specific benchmarks.

• Inferencing latency

• Fine-tuning and inferencing cost forecasting

• Extension capabilities such as tool calling.

• Licensing & service usage terms with a POV on whether they can be usable for athena.

Your expertise and guidance will also include related aspects of leveraging foundational models such as:

• Prompt engineering techniques.

• Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and Vector Databases

• Distillation

• Leveraging multiple FMs (Mixture of Experts, Ensemble learning, Hierarchical LLMs, etc.)

• Guard rails and safety.

As a member of the Research team, you will:  

• Identify opportunities for using foundational models in development and help evaluate which are best for athenahealth’s needs and on our data. 

• Team with athenahealth data owners and stakeholders to develop internal benchmark suites for quantifying performance of foundational models.

• Individually and with other members of Core AI: develop and deliver internal documentation and trainings to convey your findings broadly in the organization.

• Understand and follow conventions and best practices for modeling, coding, architecture, and statistics; and hold other team members accountable for doing so. 

• Apply rigorous testing of statistics, models, and code. 

• Contribute to the development of internal tools and Core AI team standards. 

Typical Qualifications: 

• Excellent verbal communication and writing skills. 

• Bachelors in relevant field: math, computer science, data science, economics. 

• At least 6 years of professional experience developing and evaluating machine learning models.

• At least 2 years enterprise experience training, fine-tuning, and deploying models.

• Proficient in Python. 

• Experience using machine learning models and libraries. 

• Familiarity with NLP, computer vision, ambient computing techniques.

• Experience with evaluating, prompting, and tuning foundational or GenAI models from organizations such as Amazon, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google, Hugging Face (various), Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

• Experience using the AWS ecosystem a bonus, including Kubernetes, Kubeflow or EKS experience. 

About athenahealth

Our vision: In an industry that becomes more complex by the day, we stand for simplicity. We offer IT solutions and expert services that eliminate the daily hurdles preventing h