Join us as we work to create a thriving ecosystem that delivers accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all.
Vice President of Engineering, Core AI
Location: Hybrid work model anchored to our Boston, MA office location.
About the Role: We are seeking a visionary and dynamic Vice President of Engineering to lead our AI Core team. This team serves as the center of excellence for AI at athenahealth, providing foundational AI platforms, expert guidance across key AI domains, and partnering with product teams embedding AI capabilities. The AI core team plays an essential role in harnessing artificial intelligence to transform our products for electronic health records, revenue cycle management, patient engagement, population health and payer services.
As a strategic leader and organizational connector, the VP of AI Engineering in collaboration with product management will drive the overall AI vision, technical direction, platform excellence, and collaborative engagement across R&D to enable innovative AI solutions that are accurate, scalable, and safe.
This is a unique opportunity to shape the future of AI at athenahealth by leading a small but highly impactful team at the heart of our innovative efforts. If you are a builder, connector, and visionary leader ready to drive meaningful changes in healthcare through AI, we invite you to apply.
Reporting To: Executive Vice President, Product Engineering

QUALIFICATIONS:

15+ years of engineering leadership experience, including managing high-performing teams and delivering platform-level services.
Demonstrated experience in leading AI research laboratories or innovation centers at prominent technology firms.
Demonstrated technical expertise in AI/ML infrastructure and systems, including foundational models, agent frameworks, and scalable MLOps & FMOps.
Deep understanding of the AI product lifecycle, including prompt engineering, RAG, verification, and multimodal interaction.
Effective collaborator with experience leading cross-functional projects and simplifying technical topics for diverse audiences.
Expertise in creating public-facing SaaS AI/ML products.
Passion for AI ethics, safety, and responsible innovation.

1. Leadership & Vision
   Lead a high-performing, multidisciplinary engineering team focused on foundational AI capabilities and infrastructure.
   Bring experience running AI Research Labs or Centers of Excellence at leading technology companies that publish academic papers, file patents, and shape AI innovation.
   Act as a hybrid technical leader and people manager, contributing deep subject matter expertise while developing organizational capability and reliably delivering AI platforms and services.
   Define and evolve the vision and strategic roadmap for AI platforms and services, balancing first-party development and third-party integrations.
   Establish thought leadership and elevate the market perception of athenahealth as a leader in AI.
2. Subject Matter Expertise
   Direct the AI Core team’s research staff/program to ensure we stay current on advancements in foundational models, AI evaluation/verification, agent-based systems, and human-AI interaction.
   Stay current on US healthcare relevant AI regulations and best practices for responsible AI and incorporate into our AI governance process.
   Participate in external industry forums and engage with key partners and customers.
3. Platform & Infrastructure
   Provide application teams governed access to ML/AI platforms and infrastructure, enabling secure, compliant, cost-effective, and high-performing use of innovative ML/AI models. This includes classic machine learning operations (MLOps) and foundational model operations (FMOps).
   Curate an opinionated model garden that will include third party commercial and open-source models, along with in-house developed models. Models will support language, vision, and audio/speech modalities.
   Provide environments for in-house model development and foundational model fine tuning including related capabilities such as quantization and distillation.
   Provide required platforms & infrastructure to enable techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and Mixture of Experts (MoE) approaches to inferencing.
   Define and enforce AI governance to ensure we stay compliant with regulatory requirements and follow responsible AI practices.
4. Organizational connector & AI ecosystem architect
   Serve as a strategic partner and SME to product teams embedding AI in electronic health record, practice management, revenue cycle management, population health, patient engagement and payer services products. Help guide product teams to adopt best practice architecture, design & implementation.
   Facilitate collaboration between the Core AI teams MLOps/FMOps platform team, AI researchers, product team engineers & product managers, clinical safety, regulatory, and legal stakeholders.
   Understand the product teams needs for AI model modalities (language, vision, audio, multimodal), model types (base/chat/instruct), model characteristics (context size, latency, cost…) to drive the curation of athenahealth’s model garden.
   Understand the product team needs for Agentic AI systems and help ensure we have a consistent approach that ensures verifiable, explainable, and interoperable agentic AI systems.
   Establish standardized tools, frameworks, reference patterns and best practices for application teams to consume as they embed AI throughout their products. Emphasis should be placed on providing strong guidance on prompt engineering techniques, grounding techniques and validation techniques to ensure accuracy when using non-deterministic foundational models.
   Develop the R&D teams’ AI capabilities through education and talent development. The Core AI team will define and deliver continuous AI education for the broad R&D org.