Senior AI Engineer

We're looking for an Senior AI Engineer to join a new AI Engineering team building foundational AI capabilities for mental healthcare at Talkiatry. You'll work across the AI lifecycle - from prototyping to production rollout, observability, and continuous improvement - building backend APIs, frontend interfaces, orchestration services, and internal tools that make AI useful, trustworthy, and actionable. You'll collaborate with senior engineers, product, clinical stakeholders, and data teams where your work directly impacts how AI is safely deployed in healthcare.

This role is ideal for engineers with early LLM/agentic AI experience who want to deepen their skills on real production systems and grow into ownership of AI capabilities over time.

About Talkiatry:

Talkiatry is transforming mental health care by making high-quality psychiatry more accessible, human, and sustainable for both patients and clinicians. Co-founded by a patient and a triple-board-certified psychiatrist, we were built to solve one of healthcare’s most urgent challenges: millions of people struggle to access mental health care, while clinicians face growing administrative burden and burnout. Through our technology-powered, in-network platform, we’re changing that, creating a better experience for patients and empowering clinicians to focus on delivering exceptional care.

Today, Talkiatry is the largest dedicated psychiatry practice in the U.S., with 750+ psychiatrists, 250+ therapists, and more than two million patient visits delivered nationwide. At our scale, every innovation has real impact. Every workflow we improve, every technology solution we build, and every patient experience we redesign helps thousands of clinicians provide better care to hundreds of thousands of patients. We’re not just growing quickly - we’re redefining how behavioral healthcare is delivered in America.

Joining Talkiatry means joining a mission-driven team that is solving complex problems at scale, driving meaningful change in healthcare, and building the future of mental health care with compassion, innovation, and purpose.

You will:

• Full-Stack AI Development: Build frontend interfaces, backend services, APIs, integrations, and data flows that make AI capabilities usable in patient, clinician, and internal workflows.

• Agentic AI Systems: Build and iterate on agentic systems that use reasoning, tool use, retrieval, memory, and multi-step workflows to solve healthcare problems.

• RAG & Knowledge Systems: Build and maintain RAG pipelines, ingestion workflows, retrieval tuning, semantic search, and knowledge quality improvements.

• Evaluation & Quality: Implement evaluation frameworks, automated tests, experiments, regression checks, and quality metrics to improve AI system performance over time.

• Safety, Guardrails & Observability: Implement guardrails, fallback flows, human-in-the-loop workflows, access controls, tracing, monitoring, and diagnostics for production AI systems.

• Production Delivery: Contribute to reliable production rollouts, CI/CD workflows, debugging, incident response, performance improvements, and operational efficiency.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work with senior engineers, product, clinical, design, and data partners to translate real workflows into safe, reliable AI-powered experiences.

You have:

• 2+ years of software engineering experience, including building, testing, and maintaining production software systems.

• 1+ year of experience building with LLMs, agentic AI, or production AI systems, ideally beyond simple chatbot or prompt-only use cases.

• Strong programming skills in Python and/or TypeScript, with experience building backend services, APIs, integrations, data flows, or full-stack product features.

• Experience with modern frontend or full-stack development using technologies such as React, Next.js, TypeScript, Node.js, or similar frameworks.

• Experience contributing to AI systems involving retrieval, tool use, workflow orchestration, structured outputs, context management, or multi-step execution.

• Familiarity with agentic frameworks and orchestration tools such as LangGraph, CrewAI, OpenAI Agents SDK, or similar frameworks.

• Familiarity with RAG systems, vector databases, semantic search, retrieval infrastructure, model serving, or knowledge pipelines.

• Familiarity with cloud-native development, containerized services, Kubernetes, CI/CD workflows, or scalable production environments.

• Strong debugging, communication, and collaboration skills, with the ability to work through ambiguity and make steady progress with guidance from senior engineers.

Nice to have:

• Experience building AI systems in healthcare, clinical, safety-critical, or other regulated environments.

• Familiarity with HIPAA, clinical AI safety, FDA AI/ML guidance, or compliance-aware software development.

• Experience using tests, evaluation methods, quality metrics, experiments, observability, or release checks to improve system reliability and performance.

Why Talkiatry:

• Top-notch team: we're a diverse, experienced group motivated to make a difference in mental health care

• Collaborative environment: be part of building something from the ground up at a fast-paced startup

• Excellent benefits: medical, dental, vision, effective day 1 of employment, 401K with match, generous PTO plus paid holidays, paid parental leave, and more!

• Grow your career with us: hone your skills and build new ones with our Learning team as Talkiatry expands

• It all comes back to care: we’re a mental health company, and we put our team’s well-being first

Talkiatry participates in E-Verify and will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you are authorized to work in the U.S. only after a job offer is accepted and Form I-9 is completed. For more information on E-Verify, please visit the following: EVerify Participation & IER Right to Work.

At Talkiatry, we are an equal opportunity employer committed to a diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplace and candidate experience. We strive to create an environment where everyone has a sense of belonging and purpose, and where we learn from the unique experiences of those around us.

We encourage all qualified candidates to apply regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital or family status, disability, gender, gender identity or expression, pregnancy or caregiver status, veteran status, or any other legally protected status.