Staff ML Engineer (ML/AI)

Lyra Health is hiring a Staff ML Engineer (ML/AI) for a remote role open to applicants in United States. It pays $161k-$222k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Lyra Health.

Level's read on this job

On Level's scale, this machine learning engineer role is Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
This is listed as a remote role.
The posting mentions RAG, fine tuning and MLOps among its tools and skills.
Level classes it as a lead role.
Lyra Health has 480 other open roles on Level.

AI in this role

ragfine-tuningml-opsai-evaluation

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.

About the Role

We are seeking a Staff ML/AI Engineer to define and drive the architectural vision for Lyra’s machine learning and generative AI technology landscape. In this role, you will serve as a technical anchor across the engineering and data organizations—architecting enterprise-scale AI platforms, setting technical strategy for high-impact AI/ML initiatives, and ensuring our AI products operate with top-tier reliability, security, and medical precision.

The ideal candidate is a seasoned technical leader who excels at translating complex healthcare challenges into scalable platform solutions, building consensus across cross-functional leadership, and elevating the technical bar for the entire engineering organization.

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 physicians, therapists, data scientists, data analysts and product managers

Responsibilities

Drive AI Platform Architecture: Design and execute the long-term roadmap for Lyra’s machine learning and generative AI platform, enabling fast, safe, and reliable deployment of frontier models across the company.
Lead AI Infrastructure Vision: Architect end-to-end training, fine-tuning, and low-latency inference platforms, including centralized RAG architecture, vector databases, and enterprise evaluation/guardrail frameworks.
Set Engineering Excellence Standards: Establish organizational standards for the full AI/ML SDLC—from dataset lineage and CI/CD pipelines to automated model evaluation, red-teaming, and production monitoring.
Cross-Functional Technical Leadership: Partner closely with Product Management, Data Science, Security, and Clinical leaders to translate strategic clinical goals into foundational AI capability roadmaps.
Mentor and Multiply Impact: Elevate the engineering culture by mentoring Senior ML Engineers, conducting high-leverage architectural reviews, and establishing engineering best practices across teams.
Hands-On Leadership: Lead by example through technical prototypes, critical-path architecture, and strategic coding contributions.
And of course, you will be coding!

Qualifications

8+ years of experience deploying complex ML/AI solutions into mission-critical production environments, with a proven track record of technical leadership.
Deep System & Software Engineering Expertise: Mastery of Python, RESTful API design, Protobuf, and microservices architecture.
Production AI/ML Infrastructure Mastery: Deep expertise with Docker, Kubernetes, container orchestration, and real-time inference services.
Modern Generative AI Architecture: Hands-on experience designing and deploying RAG pipelines, fine-tuning LLMs, managing vector databases, and building robust LLM evaluation/guardrail frameworks.
Data Layer Systems: Expertise with relational databases, low-latency key-value stores, distributed queueing system architectures (e.g., Celery, Kafka), and data pipeline orchestration.
Cloud Architecture: Strong experience architecting cloud-native solutions on AWS (or equivalent cloud providers).
Strategic Communication: Exceptional ability to distill highly ambiguous technical problems into clear strategic priorities and influence leadership across engineering, product, and business domain disciplines.

Preferred Qualifications

Polyglot Engineering Background: Experience writing high-performance production code in Java or Kotlin.
Healthcare & Sensitive Data Expertise: Experience architecting AI/ML systems within highly regulated environments (HIPAA compliance, SOC2, handling PHI/PII).
MLOps / Platform Productization: Experience building internal developer platforms or ML tooling used by dozens of data scientists and engineers.

"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 globaldpo@lyrahealth.com. For more information about how we use and retain your information, please see our Workforce Privacy Notice."

How we rate this

Staff ML Engineer (ML/AI) at Lyra Health rates 92 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.

●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Key facts

Staff ML Engineer (ML/AI) is an open job at Lyra Health.
Level rates this role AI Level 4 of 4: Builds AI.
The listed salary is $161k-$222k a year.
The role is based in United States and is marked remote.
The job was posted on August 8, 2026.
Seniority: lead.
Applications are handled by Lyra Health. Apply on Lyra Health

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

RAGFine-tuningML OpsAI Evaluation

Also common in machine learning engineer jobs at this level

PyTorch TensorFlow Deep learning C++Spark Google Cloud

Pay

This job starts at: $161k
Typical machine learning engineer job: $200k

This posting starts 19% below the typical machine learning engineer job. See machine learning engineer jobs

Questions you could be asked

How would you design a retrieval step so the model answers from real data instead of guessing?
Walk me through fine-tuning a model: what data did you use, and how did you check the result?
How do you monitor a model once it's live, and how do you know it needs retraining?
How do you decide that one model's output is better than another's for a given task?
How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?

Adapt your resume

List these exact terms on your resume: RAG, Fine-tuning, ML Ops, and AI Evaluation. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.

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