AI Engineer Lead

We've made a lot of progress since opening the doors in 1942, but one thing has never changed - our commitment to serve, heal, lead, educate, and innovate.  We believe that every award earned, every record broken and every patient helped is because of the dedicated employees who fill our hallways. 

At Ochsner, whether you work with patients every day or support those who do, you are making a difference and that matters.  Come make a difference at Ochsner Health and discover your future today! 

The Lead AI Engineer leads the design, engineering, delivery, and operation of the machine-learning and conversational AI platform that powers automated patient and customer interactions. Defines AI/ML engineering strategy, standards, and roadmaps, and directs the teams that build data and feature pipelines, train and evaluate models, and productionize conversational AI behind reliable, secure, and cost-efficient services.

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable qualified individuals with disabilities to perform the essential duties.

This job description is a summary of the primary duties and responsibilities of the job and position. It is not intended to be a comprehensive or all-inclusive listing of duties and responsibilities. Contents are subject to change at the company’s discretion.

Education

• Required - Bachelor's Computer Science, Machine Learning, Data Science, or related field; equivalent experience may be considered in lieu of a degree.
• Preferred - Master's

Work Experience

• Required - 8 years Software/ML engineering experience, including hands-on experience productionizing machine-learning or conversational AI systems with a minimum of 3 years in technical leadership or team-lead capacity
• Preferred - Experience I healthcare or another regulated, HIPAA-relevant environment strongly preferred.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with LLM and generative AI applications — RAG, prompting, evaluation, and fine-tuning
• Experience designing and operating systems in AWS (SageMaker, Bedrock) or a comparable cloud
• Strong SQL and experience with modern data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, or similar)
• Experience with MLOps tooling, CI/CD, and infrastructure automation
• Demonstrated track record of quantifying business impact from AI investments

Knowledge Skills and Abilities (KSAs)

• Deep knowledge of machine learning, natural language processing, and conversational AI (including retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, and large, language model-based systems); strong experience with cloud platforms, MLOps tooling, containers, and CI/CD.
• Strategic planning and roadmap translation into engineering execution.
• System design for scalability, performance, and reliability.
• Decision-making under ambiguity in emerging AI technologies.

Job Duties

• Establishes AI/ML engineering vision, operating model, and technical standards (coding, testing, security, observability) for the conversational AI platform.
• Translates product and business roadmaps into multi-quarter engineering plans, milestones, staffing models, and budgets.
• Directs development across data ingestion, feature computation, labeling, training, evaluation, packaging, deployment, and inference.
• Implements model lifecycle management and governance, including reproducibility, experiment tracking, versioning, approvals, and rollback.
• Experiment tracking, versioning, approvals, and rollback.
• Builds and scales feature stores, model registries, and training/inference platforms, optimizing for cost, latency, throughput, and reliability service-level agreements (SLAs).
• Collaborates with Product, Risk, Legal, and Compliance to document model intent, limitations, and human-in-the-loop mechanisms, and to prepare artifacts for audit in a HIPAA-regulated setting.
• Leads incident response for model and service regressions, and mentor staff and develop hiring and career paths for AI/ML engineering roles.
• Performs other duties as assigned
• Complies with all policies and standards

Interpersonal Skills

• Translates technical concepts into business language for non-technical executives
• Strong stakeholder management and cross-functional influence
• High ownership; operates well with ambiguity and shifting priorities
• Committed to developing people and building a durable team
• Sound judgment on when to ship, when to iterate, and when to stop

The above statements describe the general nature and level of work only. They are not an exhaustive list of all required responsibilities, duties, and skills. Other duties may be added, or this description amended at any time.

Remains knowledgeable on current federal, state and local laws, accreditation standards or regulatory agency requirements that apply to the assigned area of responsibility and ensures compliance with all such laws, regulations and standards.

This employer maintains and complies with its Compliance & Privacy Program and Standards of Conduct, including the immediate reporting of any known or suspected unethical or questionable behaviors or conduct; patient/employee safety, patient privacy, and/or other compliance-related concerns. The employer is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, or disability status.

Physical and Environmental Demands

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Sedentary Work- Exerting up to 10 pounds of force occasionally (occasionally means activity or conditions exist up to 1/3 of the work day), and/or, a negligible amount of force frequently (frequently means activity or condition exists from 1/3 to 2/3 of the work day) to lift, carry, push, pull, or otherwise move objects, including the human body. Sedentary work involves sitting most of the time but may involve walking or standing for brief periods of time. Jobs are sedentary if walking and standing are required only occasionally and all other sedentary criteria are met.

Normal routine involves no exposure to blood, body fluid or tissue and as part of their employment, incumbents are not called upon to perform or assist in emergency care or first aid.
The incumbent has no occupational risk for exposure to communicable diseases .

Because the incumbent works within a healthcare setting, there may be occupational risk for exposure to hazardous medications or hazardous waste within the environment through receipt, transport, storage, preparation, dispensing, administration, cleaning and/or disposal of contaminated waste. The risk level of exposure may increase depending on the essential job duties of the role.

Are you ready to make a difference? Apply Today!

Ochsner Health does not consider an individual an applicant until they have formally applied to the open position on this careers website.

Please refer to the job description to determine whether the position you are interested in is remote or on-site. Individuals who reside in and will work from the following areas are not eligible for remote work position: Colorado, California, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, Washington, and Washington D.C.

Ochsner Health endeavors to make our site accessible to all users.  If you would like to contact us regarding the accessibility of our website, or if you need an accommodation to complete the application process, please contact our HR Employee Solution Center at 504-842-4748 (select option 1) or [email protected]. This contact information is for accommodation requests only and cannot be used to inquire about the status of applications.

Ochsner is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to any legally protected class, including protected veterans and individuals with disabilities.