Hybrid Senior AI Engineer

at Talkspace

• Job title: Senior AI Engineer
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Senior
• Salary: $169,000 - $200,000 per year
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: AWS, Cloud, Docker, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, Python
• Location requirements: Hybrid, New York City, United States

About the role

• Senior AI Engineer designing and implementing AI agents for Talkspace's behavioral health platform. Leading technical architecture and applying RL techniques for safe and ethical user interactions.

Responsibilities

• Autonomous System Architecture: Design and implement the technical architecture for Sentia’s core AI agents, including the development of planning modules, memory/retrieval systems, goal-setting algorithms, and tool-use orchestration.
• Reinforcement Learning (RL) for Behavior: Apply advanced RL, Inverse RL, or related control theory methods to develop agents capable of adaptive, long-term intervention strategies that maximize positive user outcomes while minimizing risk (e.g., optimizing interaction sequencing, timing, and content).
• LLM Integration and Fine-tuning: Select, fine-tune, and deploy foundation models (LLMs) to power agent reasoning, natural language understanding, and empathetic, context-aware communication with users.
• Complex Interaction Modeling: Develop models for human-agent interaction (HAI), incorporating principles from cognitive science and behavioral economics to ensure agents are effective, trustworthy, and aligned with therapeutic protocols.
• Simulated Environments: Construct robust simulation environments for pre-training and testing agent policies, ensuring system stability and safety across a wide range of psychological and behavioral scenarios.
• Performance and Resilience: Optimize the deployment environment to manage the computational demands of multi-agent orchestration, ensuring low-latency decision-making and high system resilience.
• Technical Strategy: Lead the evaluation and adoption of new agentic frameworks, reasoning technologies, and system design patterns that position Sentia as a leader in autonomous behavioral health technology.
• Agent Evaluation & Observability: Design and implement comprehensive evaluation pipelines for multi-agent orchestration—including visualisations, trace-level analysis of LLM calls and tool invocations, offline evaluation against golden datasets, real-time production monitoring for behavioral drift and outcome correlation, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop annotation workflows. Establish metrics frameworks to assess reasoning quality, task completion, safety compliance, and task alignment across the full agent lifecycle.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a highly quantitative field.
• Minimum of 5+ years of experience in a production software engineering environment, with at least 3+ years specifically focused on designing, implementing, and deploying complex machine learning or autonomous systems.
• Exceptional Python Programming Skills: Mastery of Python and its scientific libraries.
• Production MLOps Expertise: Demonstrated experience building and managing CI/CD pipelines for ML models and integrating them into service-oriented architectures (SOA).
• Autonomous/Agentic Systems: Strong theoretical understanding and practical application of techniques central to agentic AI, such as Reinforcement Learning (RL), planning algorithms, or complex decision-making systems.
• LLM Deployment: Hands-on experience fine-tuning, deploying, and managing Large Language Models (LLMs) in a production environment, including knowledge of prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and cost optimization.
• Software Engineering Rigor: Proven ability to write high-quality, maintainable, scalable, and well-tested production code.
• Proficiency with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP) and containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).

Benefits

• Comprehensive Medical, Dental and Vision plans coverage since day one
• Pre-tax benefits: HSA/ FSA
• 401k Retirement Savings Program with matching up to 4%
• Voluntary benefits including disability, basic life or pet insurance, etc.
• Monthly Wellness Stipend to promote mental and physical self-care
• Flexible PTO and Remote First Environment
• Regular team events, including Wellness Workshops and Team Building Events
• Free access to Talkspace products for you and one household member, as well as access to a friends and family discount!