Senior AI/ML Backend Engineer

    United States
    Full-Time
    Senior (7+ yrs)
    Engineering & Development
    Posted on July 30, 2026

    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:
  1. 4+ years of experience delivering production ready products

  2. Ability to write high-quality code in Python

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

  4. Experience working with Docker and deploying applications to Kubernetes

  5. Experience with relational and low-latency databases

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

  7. Experience building generative AI chatbots

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

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

  10. A desire to learn new technologies quickly

  11. A love of building systems from scratch

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

  13. Excellent communication skills with a talent for building consensus and alignment

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

  15. Nice to haves:
  16. Experience setting up and maintaining vector databases

  17. Experience working with Celery

  18. Experience defining and using Protobuf messages

  19. Experience writing production code in Java/Kotlin

  20. Experience building solutions on cloud infrastructure, particularly AWS

  21. Experience working with highly sensitive data in a healthcare environment

  22. Company:  Lyra Health

    Provides AI-powered workforce mental health benefits, transforming access to life-changing mental health care through provider matching and personalized support.
    1001-5000 employees
    Healthcare & Life Sciences
    HQ: United States