Lead LLM Engineer, Full Stack

We’re seeking a mission driven Lead LLM engineer to join our incredible engineering team at Cairns Health. The role sits at the crossroads of voice driven healthcare and ambient sensing, using conversational AI, radar and sensor fusion to empower patients to “use their voice” to engage more actively in their health and wellness. A key part of our experience is our digital health and lifestyle assistant Luna, who interacts on a daily basis with our users, building trust and rapport, simplifying complex care plans to behavioral nudges and engaging seniors and their loved ones to address social isolation, loneliness and more!

You’ll play a pivotal role in the success of our product, including managing and innovating our LLM architecture to ensure we are always delivering a best in class experience with low latency, high empathy and an always useful engagement. You will also work side by side with our prompt engineering team to continuously add more features that reduce friction for our users and increase the value of the platform through making their lives easier and supporting their health journey.

Our ideal candidate has 3 years experience working solely in LLMs, is a proactive problem solver with a hands-on approach to coding and a positive, can-do attitude. Ideally you have experience deploying LLM’s on multiple platforms including mobile, hardware, telephony and PC endpoints as we are striving to provide an LLM anywhere experience for our users. Healthcare experience is a plus but not required.

Duties & Responsibilities

• Manage and maintain LLM infrastructure with appropriate guardrails to ensure we are maximizing access to features that can be delivered consistently and on persona while mitigating hallucinations
• Design and implement appropriate architecture to ensure performance including constellations with failover capabilities
• Daily coding and and weekly code reviews with CTO
• Daily collaboration with prompt engineering team to drive pipeline of new features to staging and production environments
• Optimize our LLM applications for latency, concurrency, uptime, and other key metrics
• Collaborate with a team of accomplished, high-performing engineers.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field or equivalent practical experience, coupled with 3-5 years of professional experience as a Full Stack Software Engineer or in a similar role.
• 3 years professional experience in LLM architectures (e.g. RAG, Constellations, etc…) is a must.
• Familiarity with commonly used LLM APIs (OpenAI, Gemini, Claude, etc.).
• Familiarity with modern Voice AI application stacks (STT models, LLM models, TTS models) desired.
• Proficient in Python and Java 11+ for developing robust server-side applications and experienced in designing and implementing RESTful APIs to facilitate seamless integration between front-end and back-end systems.
• Hands-on experience with PostgreSQL or other relational databases, ensuring efficient data storage, retrieval, and management for scalable applications.
• Proficient in containerization using Docker and orchestration with Kubernetes, with a proven track record of deploying and managing applications on AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) and ECS (Elastic Container Service).
• Familiarity with messaging systems like Kafka and MQTT for real-time data processing and communication, along with proficiency in using GitHub for version control and collaborative development.
• Experience implementing and managing CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions or similar tools, familiarity with Agile/Scrum methodologies for iterative and collaborative software development, and strong problem-solving and analytical abilities to tackle complex technical challenges.
• Positive, team player with strong people skills and excellent communication.

Benefits

We offer competitive compensation, equity & benefits - including medical, dental, vision and paid vacation/sick days and 401(k) plans.

Location

Preference: Local to Sunnyvale, CA. We are an office based organization. Will consider remote / hybrid for right candidate.

About Cairns Health

Cairns Health (https://www.cairns.ai/) is creating a fundamentally better healthcare experience for people with chronic health conditions and those who care for them. We make healthcare more accessible by simplifying complex care plans, connecting care teams and meeting patients where they live. Through our conversational AI, patients use their voice to interact with our digital care companion, who proactively gives medication reminders, symptom checks, behavioral nudges and even engages in friendly conversation to ease loneliness. Cairns uses a device that includes radar to put the patient in context and passively monitors their activities, including: heart rate, breathing rate and sleep stages, all without a wearable. The result is informed and timely intervention that drives improved clinical outcomes, reduced care delivery costs and a more satisfactory healthcare experience for all.

To Apply

Please send your resume and cover letter to anya @ cairns.ai