Principal AI Engineer - Personalization and Recommendation

At Rula, this role owns the applied AI and ML solutions that determine what, how, and how well AI shows up across mental healthcare. The focus isn’t on isolated prototypes, but on building production-grade AI systems that directly power patient-provider matching, clinical workflows, and patient engagement. While your immediate focus will be driving search ranking, relevance, and patient-provider matching, your broader scope encompasses our overarching personalization and recommendation strategies, alongside directing the foundational ML platforms that support them at scale.

You’ll operate where applied research, system architecture, and real-world clinical constraints meet. The work spans developing advanced recommendation engines and retrieval models, applying NLP and generative AI to clinical workflows, setting technical standards for AI safety, and making principal decisions about how machine learning is introduced into a high-stakes environment.

About the Role

• Drive search ranking, relevance, and patient-provider matching.
• Own overarching personalization and recommendation strategies and foundational ML platforms.
• Develop and fine-tune models (Learning-to-Rank, embeddings, recommendation algorithms, LLMs).
• Design product-facing AI architectures and core ML infrastructure.
• Act as a technical multiplier for engineers working across product surfaces.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering, including 7+ years designing and scaling distributed systems, and 5+ years building and deploying production-grade ML applications.
• 5+ years of deep, hands-on experience building and optimizing search, ranking, relevance, or recommendation engines at scale (Learning-to-Rank, collaborative filtering, deep recommender systems, semantic vector search).
• 5+ years of strong programming experience in Python and at least one backend language (TypeScript, Java, or Go).
• 2+ years of experience building AI-powered products using foundation models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini) and LLM integration patterns (RAG, agents).
• Strong proven track record working with traditional search/retrieval infrastructure (Elasticsearch, OpenSearch) and modern vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS, Milvus).
• 3+ years of experience with MLOps, data pipelines, and rigorous evaluation systems (offline metrics like NDCG/MAP, online A/B testing).

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience architecting secure and compliant AI solutions in regulated environments (HIPAA, GDPR).
• Familiarity with human-in-the-loop systems and clinical decision support frameworks.
• Experience designing evaluation pipelines for human alignment, factual accuracy, or model interpretability.
• Contributions to open-source AI frameworks or applied research in NLP, healthcare AI, or GenAI safety.
• Experience contributing to early-stage team growth (0 to 1).
• Experience leading or mentoring engineering teams in AI, ML platform, or applied research domains.

Benefits & Perks

• 100% remote work environment: US-based (currently not hiring in Hawaii).
• Comprehensive health benefits: Medical, dental, vision, life, disability, and FSA/HSA.
• Retirement plan: 401(k) plan access.
• Generous time-off: Generous PTO policies including 2 company-wide shutdown weeks each year.
• Paid parental leave: Available for all parents (birthing, non-birthing, adopting, fostering).
• Support & Wellness: Employee Assistance Program (EAP), wellness initiatives, and a $50/month wellness stipend.
• Home office support: New hire home office stipend and $50 monthly stipend for internet/phone expenses.