Senior AI/ML Backend Engineer

About Lyra Health Lyra Health is a leading provider of evidence-based mental health care, serving more than 20 million people globally in partnership with employers and more than 100 million through health plan and partner relationships. The company has delivered more than 15 million sessions of mental health care, published more than 35 peer-reviewed studies, and delivered unmatched outcomes in terms of access, clinical effectiveness, and cost efficiency. Extensive peer-reviewed research confirms Lyra’s transformative care model helps people recover twice as fast and results in a 26% annual reduction in overall healthcare claims costs. Lyra is transforming access to life-changing mental health care through Lyra Empower, the only fully integrated, AI-powered platform combining the highest-quality care and technology solutions.

We are looking for an experienced Senior AI/ML Backend Engineer who is eager to build the backend services for our AI/ML product features that make a significant impact within the organization. The ideal candidate will be enthusiastic about taking ownership of their work and spearheading cross-functional projects. Lyra is for you if you Thrive on working with brilliant teammates to solve complex, meaningful problems Are passionate about making a social impact and supporting people at their most challenging moments Enjoy cross-functional collaboration with therapists, data scientists, engineers and product managers In this role, you will Be part of a team working on building our machine learning and generative AI backend services that will support the many ML/AI product features. Create the necessary backend infrastructure to enable scalable, resilient and highly performant solutions Deploy and manage various applications in production And of course, you will be coding every day! We are looking for someone with: 6+ years of experience delivering production ready products

Ability to write high-quality code in Python

Experience with modern async Python web frameworks (e.g., FastAPI) and handling data streaming (WebSockets, Server-Sent Events)

Experience working with Docker and deploying applications to Kubernetes

Experience with relational and low-latency databases

Experience integrating RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) into AI features

Experience building generative AI chatbots

Experience with LLM observability and monitoring tools (e.g., Langfuse) to track latency, token usage, and output quality.

Familiarity with LLM orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex) and integrating with foundation model APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock)

A desire to learn new technologies quickly

A love of building systems from scratch

A thoughtful approach to balancing quality and deadlines in fast-paced settings

Excellent communication skills with a talent for building consensus and alignment

Strong organizational skills and the ability to distill complex problems into clear priorities that move the team and business forward Nice to haves: Experience setting up and maintaining vector databases

Experience working with Celery

Experience defining and using Protobuf messages

Experience writing production code in Java/Kotlin

Experience building solutions on cloud infrastructure, particularly AWS

Experience working with highly sensitive data in a healthcare environment