Senior AI ENGINEER – Application Development

Senior AI ENGINEER – Application Development
 

Hybrid (Office 3 days/wk – Onsite-Flex) within Oregon, Washington, Idaho or Utah 

Build a career with purpose. Join our Cause to create a person-focused and economically sustainable health care system.  

Who We Are Looking For: 

Every day, Cambia’s Applied AI Team is living our mission to make health care easier and lives better. We are looking for a senior technical leader responsible for designing, building, and productionizing AI applications that improve healthcare for Cambia members. This is a hands-on technical leadership role where you’ll architect AI solutions, establish application engineering standards, and mentor teams while remaining deeply involved in writing production code. You’ll work at the intersection of software engineering and AI, transforming prototypes and experimental models into robust, scalable applications that deliver real value.

Working on top of Cambia’s AI/ML platform, you’ll collaborate with AI scientists, platform engineers, and product teams to build everything from GenAI-powered member experiences to intelligent automation systems. This role requires someone who can both ship production code and influence architecture decisions, who understands the full AI/ML development lifecycle, and who can translate complex technical concepts for diverse stakeholders.

If you're a motivated and experienced AI Engineer looking to make a difference in healthcare, we’d love to hear from you!
What You Bring to Cambia

Technical Leadership & Execution:

• Expert-level experience designing and building production AI applications at scale

• Proven track record of establishing application engineering standards and best practices adopted across teams

• Strong hands-on coding skills with production Python, API development, and application architecture

• Experience architecting AI-powered applications from prototype to production

• Ability to evaluate and introduce new AI technologies and application patterns

AI Application Engineering Expertise:

• Deep experience building production applications using ML, NLP, and GenAI technologies

• Strong software engineering fundamentals: API design, testing, observability, error handling

• Solid grounding in AI evaluation methodologies (evals) for assessing model & application performance

• Experience with application deployment patterns (containerization, CI/CD)

• Proficiency in working with ML platforms and model serving APIs

• Knowledge of application monitoring, logging, and debugging in production environments

• Experience integrating AI capabilities into user-facing applications and business workflows

AI/ML Systems Knowledge:

• Comprehensive understanding of ML, DL, NLP, and GenAI from an application development perspective

• Experience working with AI scientists to integrate models into production applications

• Understanding of prompt engineering, RAG patterns, GenAI, and agentic application architectures including Model Context Protocol (MCP) for tool integration

• Familiarity with model APIs, versioning strategies, and handling model updates in applications

• Knowledge of responsible AI practices: bias detection, explainability, safety guardrails

Organizational Leadership & Influence:

• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers through code review, design review, and pair programming

• Strong communication skills - can explain technical decisions to engineers, AI scientists, product managers, and business stakeholders

• Experience driving technical initiatives across multiple application teams

• Track record of improving development velocity and application reliability

Nice to Have:

• Industry recognition through publications, conference talks, or open-source contributions

• Experience in healthcare or other regulated industries

• Background in distributed systems or high-scale application development

Qualifications and Certifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field

• 10+ years of experience in software development, AI/ML Engineering, or related discipline

• Equivalent combination of education and experience

What You Will Do at Cambia

AI Application Development:

• Design and build production AI applications that leverage Cambia's AI/ML platform

• Develop rapid GenAI prototypes to validate technical approaches and business value

• Transform experimental models and prototypes into production-ready applications

• Build APIs, user interfaces, and integrations that expose AI capabilities to end users

• Implement application-level monitoring, error handling, and observability

• Design and implement evaluation frameworks to continuously assess AI application quality and safety

• Write production code, conduct code reviews, and maintain high engineering standards

• Troubleshoot and resolve complex issues with AI applications in production

• Optimize application performance, cost, and user experience

Technical Leadership:

• Define and champion AI application engineering standards and best practices

• Architect solutions for complex AI application challenges

• Mentor AI engineers and scientists on production application development

• Lead technical design reviews for AI-powered features and applications

• Evaluate and recommend new AI technologies, frameworks, and application patterns

• Collaborate with platform engineers to provide feedback on platform capabilities

• Work with cross-functional teams to align technical solutions with business needs

Strategic Contribution:

• Contribute to technical roadmap for AI application development

• Represent application engineering perspective in planning discussions

• Share knowledge through internal tech talks, documentation, and training

• Stay current with GenAI and AI application development innovations

You're a great fit if you:

• Get excited about building AI-powered applications that users love

• Have strong opinions about application architecture, API design, and code quality

• Enjoy mentoring others and seeing your architectural patterns adopted widely

• Can context-switch between writing application code, integrating ML models, and explaining trade-offs to product managers

• Think about problems like "How do we build 10 GenAI applications efficiently?" not "How do we build the GenAI platform?"

• Want to stay technical but also influence how an organization builds AI applications

• Love rapid prototyping but also care deeply about production quality

• Believe that rigorous evaluation (evals) is essential to building trustworthy AI applications

• Are excited about emerging standards like MCP that enabled more sophisticated AI systems

This role is NOT a fit if you:

• Primarily want to focus on model research and experimentation

• Want to build infrastructure and platforms rather than applications

• Prefer working independently without cross-team collaboration

• Are looking for a pure people management role

• Want to focus exclusively on algorithm development

The expected hiring range for The Senior AI Engineer is $150k–$180k, depending on skills, experience, education, and training; relevant licensure / certifications; performance history; and work location. The bonus target for this position is 15%.  The current full salary range for this position is $104k Low/ $169k MRP

About Cambia

Working at Cambia means being part of a purpose-driven, award-winning culture built on trust and innovation anchored in our 100+ year history. Our caring and supportive colleagues are some of the best and brightest in the industry, innovating together toward sustainable, person-focused health care.  Whether we're helping members, lending a hand to a colleague or volunteering in our communities, our compassion, empathy and team spirit always shine through.

Why Join the Cambia Team?

At Cambia, you can:  

• Work alongside diverse teams building cutting-edge solutions to transform health care.  
• Earn a competitive salary and enjoy generous benefits while doing work that changes lives.  
• Grow your career with a company committed to helping you succeed. 
• Give back to your community by participating in Cambia-supported outreach programs.  
• Connect with colleagues who share similar interests and backgrounds through our employee resource groups.  

We believe a career at Cambia is more than just a paycheck – and your compensation should be too. Our compensation package includes competitive base pay as well as a market-leading 401(k) with a significant company match, bonus opportunities and more.  

In exchange for helping members live healthy lives, we offer benefits that empower you to do the same. Just a few highlights include: 

• Medical, dental and vision coverage for employees and their eligible family members, including mental health benefits. 
• Annual employer contribution to a health savings account.  
• Generous paid time off varying by role and tenure in addition to 10 company-paid holidays. 
• Market-leading retirement plan including a company match on employee 401(k) contributions, with a potential discretionary contribution based on company performance (no vesting period). 
• Up to 12 weeks of paid parental time off (eligibility requires 12 months of continuous service with Cambia immediately preceding leave). 
• Award-winning wellness programs that reward you for participation. 
• Employee Assistance Fund for those in need. 
• Commute and parking benefits. 

Learn more about our benefits. 

We are happy to offer work from home options for most of our roles. To take advantage of this flexible option, we require employees to have a wired internet connection that is not satellite or cellular and internet service with a minimum upload speed of 5Mb and a minimum download speed of 10 Mb.