Senior AI/ML Backend Engineer

About Lyra Health Lyra Health is a leading provider of evidence-based mental health care, serving more than 20 million people globally in partnership with employers and more than 100 million through health plan and partner relationships. The company has delivered more than 15 million sessions of mental health care, published more than 35 peer-reviewed studies, and delivered unmatched outcomes in terms of access, clinical effectiveness, and cost efficiency. Extensive peer-reviewed research confirms Lyra’s transformative care model helps people recover twice as fast and results in a 26% annual reduction in overall healthcare claims costs. Lyra is transforming access to life-changing mental health care through Lyra Empower, the only fully integrated, AI-powered platform combining the highest-quality care and technology solutions.

We are looking for an experienced Senior AI/ML Backend Engineer who is eager to build the backend services for our AI/ML product features that make a significant impact within the organization.  The ideal candidate will be enthusiastic about taking ownership of their work and spearheading cross-functional projects.

Lyra is for you if you

• Thrive on working with brilliant teammates to solve complex, meaningful problems

• Are passionate about making a social impact and supporting people at their most challenging moments

• Enjoy cross-functional collaboration with therapists, data scientists, engineers and product managers

In this role, you will

• Be part of a team working on building our machine learning and generative AI backend services that will support the many ML/AI product features. 

• Create the necessary backend infrastructure to enable scalable, resilient and highly performant solutions

• Deploy and manage various applications in production

• And of course, you will be coding every day!

We are looking for someone with:

• 6+ years of experience delivering production ready products

• Ability to write high-quality code in Python

• Experience with modern async Python web frameworks (e.g., FastAPI) and handling data streaming (WebSockets, Server-Sent Events)

• Experience working with Docker and deploying applications to Kubernetes

• Experience with relational and low-latency databases

• Experience integrating RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) into AI features

• Experience building generative AI chatbots

• Experience with LLM observability and monitoring tools (e.g., Langfuse) to track latency, token usage, and output quality.

• Familiarity with LLM orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex) and integrating with foundation model APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock)

• A desire to learn new technologies quickly

• A love of building systems from scratch

• A thoughtful approach to balancing quality and deadlines in fast-paced settings

• Excellent communication skills with a talent for building consensus and alignment

• Strong organizational skills and the ability to distill complex problems into clear priorities that move the team and business forward

Nice to haves:

• Experience setting up and maintaining vector databases

• Experience working with Celery

• Experience defining and using Protobuf messages

• Experience writing production code in Java/Kotlin

• Experience building solutions on cloud infrastructure, particularly AWS

• Experience working with highly sensitive data in a healthcare environment

"We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age, disability, genetic information or any other category protected by law.   By applying for this position, you acknowledge that your personal information will be processed as per the Lyra Health Workforce Privacy Notice. Through this application, to the extent permitted by law, we will collect personal information from you including, but not limited to, your name, email address, gender identity, employment information, and phone number for the purposes of recruiting and assessing suitability, aptitude, skills, qualifications, and interests for employment with Lyra.  We may also collect information about your race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, which is considered sensitive personal information under the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) and special category data under the UK and EU GDPR.  Providing this information is optional and completely voluntary, and if you provide it you consent to Lyra processing it for the purposes as described at the point of collection, for example for diversity and inclusion initiatives.  If you are a California resident and would like to limit how we use this information, please use the Limit the Use of My Sensitive Personal Information form.  This information will only be retained for as long as needed to fulfill the purposes for which it was collected, as described above. Please note that Lyra does not “sell” or “share” personal information as defined by the CPRA. Outside of the United States, for example in the EU, Switzerland and the UK, you may have the right to request access to, or a copy of, your personal information, including in a portable format; request that we delete your information from our systems; object to or restrict processing of your information; or correct inaccurate or outdated personal information in our systems. These rights may be subject to legal limitations. To exercise your data privacy rights outside of the United States, please contact [email protected]. For more information about how we use and retain your information, please see our Workforce Privacy Notice."