This is a remote role; however, there will be meetings in the Sacramento area several times a year. Candidates are expected to work business hours, Monday-Friday, Pacific Time Zone.
Join DHCS’s Behavioral Health Transformation: Where Purpose Meets Innovation
Location: Remote
Department: Department of Healthcare Services (DHCS), Behavioral Health Transformation (BHT)
Commitment: Full-Time Consultant (W2 employee of Speridian or 1099/IC for Speridian)
Why DHCS?
At DHCS we are leading a transformative journey in Behavioral Health, reshaping systems and services to ensure better outcomes for communities across California. Our Behavioral Health transformation initiative is more than a project—it’s a movement to make California a leader in accessible, high-quality health services. We’re setting the stage for a new era of government services built on agile methodologies, cutting-edge technology, continuous improvement, and a relentless commitment to serving the public good.
At DHCS, we’re looking for innovators who are passionate about purposeful work and excited by the opportunity to drive lasting change through innovative solutions.
Our core values are what make us successful and define the impact we have on the DHCS program and California’s citizens.
- Partnership: Respect Other, Practice Empathy, Earn Trust
- Ownership: Take Accountability, Show Reliability, Act with Integrity
- Grit: Bring Passion, Exhibit Perseverance, Demonstrate Resilience
- Value: Drive Outcomes, Maximize Impact, Keep Improving
Ready to pioneer the future of AI in government healthcare? Join the Department of Healthcare Services (DHCS) as a Senior Principal Engineer in our AI Organization, where you'll architect and build AI systems that revolutionize healthcare for 15 million Californians.
As a Senior Principal Engineer, you'll be a founding member of our AI Organization, a small team of exceptional engineers building production AI systems that actually ship and create massive impact. You'll be a part of the entire product lifecycle from fine-tuning foundational models to building the interfaces real people use daily, while also creating platforms that enable hundreds of developers across DHCS to build AI-powered features.
DHCS offers the unique opportunity to apply AI to healthcare at massive scale with real human impact, that will save human lives. You'll have technical ownership, access to current industry leading models and compute resources, and the mandate to build AI systems that ship to production and improve health outcomes.
We're seeking an exceptional engineer with a track record of shipping AI products that matter – someone who has built features that millions of people use daily or created hundreds of millions of dollars in business value, who can fine-tune GPT models before breakfast and ship a production feature by lunch, and who understands that democratizing AI across an organization multiplies impact exponentially.
AI Platform Development
- Write the APIs, SDKs, and libraries that enable developers to integrate AI
- Build developer tools, debugging interfaces, and observability systems
- Implement platform services for model serving, caching, and rate limiting
- Code the infrastructure and deployment pipelines for multi-tenant AI systems
- Create the systems and mechanisms to accelerate all types of development with AI
End-to-End AI Product Development
- Build complete AI products writing code from backend services to React frontends
- Fine-tune and deploy foundational models (GPT, Claude, LLaMA) for healthcare use cases
- Implement production inference systems, write APIs, and build user interfaces
- Code monitoring systems, A/B testing frameworks, and data pipelines
Technical Architecture & Implementation
- Design and code AI architecture patterns used across the organization
- Build MLOps systems for model versioning, deployment, and rollback
- Write infrastructure as code for scalable, multi-tenant AI systems
- Implement cost optimization through code-level improvements
Cross-Functional Technical Leadership
- Partner with teams to identify AI opportunities and build solutions
- Enable other teams through platform development and hands-on assistance
- Mentor senior engineers through code reviews and pair programming
- Translate technical decisions and trade-offs to executive leadership
Safety & Compliance Implementation
- Code safety measures and HIPAA compliance into AI systems
- Build explainability features and audit logging systems
- Implement evaluation frameworks for model performance and bias
- Write automated testing for AI safety and compliance
Qualifications
- 7+ years of software engineering with 1+ years building production AI/ML systems
- Proven track record of shipping products that either generated $10M+ in value OR became household names for millions of users
- Extensive hands-on coding experience across full stack development
- Experience building developer platforms, APIs, or SDKs
- Experience fine-tuning and deploying large language models in production
- Strong coding skills in Python, Java, TypeScript/JavaScript, and modern frameworks
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience
- LLM Technologies: GPT-4, Claude, LLaMA, Gemini fine-tuning and deployment
- AI Frameworks: Hugging Face Transformers, LangChain, OpenAI APIs, Anthropic APIs
- Backend Development: Python, FastAPI, C#, microservices architecture, etc
- Frontend Development: React, C#, TypeScript, modern CSS, etc
- Platform Development: API design, SDK development, developer tools
- Databases: SQL, noSQL, document databases, vector databases, data stores, etc
- Cloud Platforms: AWS, GCP, etc
- Infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines
- Monitoring: Datadog, Weights & Biases, custom observability
- Version Control: Git, GitHub, code review processes
- Track record of shipping high-impact products to production
- Ability to code quickly while maintaining quality
- Strong debugging and problem-solving abilities
- Experience building platforms used by other developers
- Clear technical communication and documentation skills
Interview process:
Recruiter call and then:
- Codility Assessment
- Written Assessment
- Interviews - 3 interviews
- Leadership interview #1 (2 hours)
- Leadership interview #2 (1 Hour)
- Leadership interview #3 (30 minutes)
Speridian is an EEO employer
Top Skills
What We Do
Speridian is an innovative, thought-leading digital modernization company that leverages modern software engineering and proprietary platform solutions to streamline and enhance interactions between clients and constituents within commercial and public sector markets.
As a global business and technology solutions provider, Speridian's business and technology experts help clients modernize their businesses through Digital Transformation. Headquartered in Albuquerque, NM, with regional offices in the Americas, Middle East, Singapore, India, Pakistan, and Philippines; Speridian has been at the forefront of CRM, ERP, HR, CX innovation since 2003.
Our Next-Gen Solutions Practice combined with our partnerships with leading innovators such as Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce, Google, Amazon, UiPath, Adobe, SAP etc has led to our proven track record of solving the most pressing business problems with our unique, industry-based 3-pillar approach: (1) business focus, 2) technology-fuelled innovation, and 3) delivery excellence.
Speridian’s services include consulting, testing and quality assurance, custom development, cloud computing, IT support and managed services, AI and machine learning, system integration, big data and analytics, customer experience solutions, application modernization, and staffing professional services.
Based on the rich domain expertise that Speridian acquired over the years, Speridian developed several advanced platforms, enhancing their service offerings:
CaseXellence, a low-code intelligent process automation platform, is designed for public sector enterprises. It modernizes legacy infrastructure and includes pre-built solutions focused on security, transparency, and traceability.
Beacon, another of Speridian’s innovations, is a comprehensive suite of banking solutions. It offers a range of products including Core Banking, Loan Management, and Banking Analytics, catering to over 200 financial institutions.
Finally, Speridian O360 is an Enterprise management platform providing a 360-degree view of core HR and Project Management processes. Tailored for small to medium-sized organizations, it aims to boost productivity by automating manual tasks, allowing HR to focus on strategic and critical business tasks.
