Director of AI Engineering

Director of AI

Employment Type: Full-time

Position Overview

Talkiatry is seeking a Director of AI to drive AI innovations that make high quality mental healthcare more accessible. In this role, you’ll be the founding member of our AI technical team, defining and executing its roadmap, and lead cross-functional efforts spanning engineering, clinical, compliance, and product teams.

About Talkiatry

Talkiatry transforms psychiatry with accessible, human, and responsible care. We’re a national mental health practice co-founded by a patient and a triple-board-certified psychiatrist to solve the problems both groups face in accessing and providing the highest quality treatment.

60% of adults in the U.S. with a diagnosable mental illness go untreated every year because care is inaccessible, while 45% of clinicians are out of network with insurers because reimbursement rates are low, and paperwork is unduly burdensome.

With innovative technology and a human-centered philosophy, we provide patients with the care they need—and allow psychiatrists to focus on why they got into medicine.

Responsibilities

• Define and lead the AI roadmap across experimentation, model evaluation, deployment, and iteration.
• Architect systems to support safe and scalable LLM interactions—including prompt chaining, memory retention, and RAG pipelines.
• Develop strategies for model selection (e.g., Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, open-source) and cost-effective inference at scale.
• Design and implement experiments to evaluate the efficacy, safety, and impact of AI innovations.
• Build and scale a high-performing AI team across machine learning, data science, MLOps, and backend infrastructure.
• Serve as the AI technical authority in conversations with external vendors, cloud partners, compliance officers, and executive stakeholders.
• Partner with legal and clinical teams to ensure HIPAA compliance, BAA alignment, and safe handling of sensitive patient data.

Requirements

Technical Skills:

• Expert in large language models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, etc.), including fine-tuning, prompt engineering, embeddings, and context window optimization.
• Hands-on experience with RAG frameworks, vector databases (Pinecone, FAISS, Redis), and memory architectures.
• Strong programming background in Python and ML stack (PyTorch, HuggingFace Transformers, LangChain, Weights & Biases).
• Proficiency with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and orchestration tools (Airflow, FastAPI, etc.).
• Deep familiarity with model evaluation frameworks—automated and human-in-the-loop—for conversation safety, empathy, and hallucination detection.

Experience:

• 7+ years of experience in AI/ML roles, with at least 3 years leading cross-functional teams including engineering, product, and research.
• A successful track record of shipping production-grade AI systems—ideally in healthcare, mental health, or another mission-critical domain.
• Deep technical fluency in LLMs, retrieval systems, and safe interaction design—with an ability to lead architectural decisions and implementation.
• Experience building or managing AI teams from 0→1, with a strong recruiting eye and mentorship skills.
• Familiarity with ethical AI, including red-teaming, bias mitigation, explainability, and escalation protocols for risky outputs.
• Strong understanding of healthcare compliance (e.g., HIPAA, PHI), including how to architect systems with auditability and patient safety in mind.
• A pragmatic approach to experimentation and iteration—balancing cutting-edge AI with operational feasibility and clinical guardrails.
• Exceptional communication skills—you can convey technical decisions to both engineers and executives, and lead strategic conversations with confidence.

Why Talkiatry

• Top-notch team: Join a diverse, motivated group committed to reshaping mental health care.

Application Instructions

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Company Information

Talkiatry transforms psychiatry with accessible, human, and responsible care. We’re a national mental health practice co-founded by a patient and a triple-board-certified psychiatrist to solve the problems both groups face in accessing and providing the highest quality treatment.