Principal AI Engineer

What You'll Do   

The Principal AI Engineer is a senior individual contributor who helps Strive turn AI into real operating leverage across the business. This role will work as a forward-deployed AI engineer embedded with business and functional leaders to identify high-value problems, rapidly prototype and deploy practical AI solutions, and help teams adopt new ways of working enabled by enterprise AI platforms such as Claude Code, Glean, and related tools. 

This role is not accountable for Strive's core product roadmaps. Instead, they will operate horizontally across the company, partnering with teams in clinical operations, corporate functions, care model support, and technology to automate workflows, build internal agents and copilots, improve decision support, and accelerate execution. They will combine strong hands-on AI engineering capability with sound judgment about what is worth building, how to deploy it safely, and how to help others use AI effectively. 

Reporting to the VP, Engineering, this role will also help shape Strive's broader AI enablement strategy by influencing platform and tooling recommendations, establishing repeatable patterns for safe and effective AI deployment, training technical and non-technical users, and serving as an internal evangelist for AI transformation.  

The Day to Day   

• Partner directly with leaders across business units to identify, prioritize, and sequence high-leverage AI opportunities that reduce manual work, improve speed, and increase quality. 
• Act as a forward-deployed AI engineer, embedding with teams to understand workflows in detail and translate them into practical automations, copilots, agents, and decision-support tools. 
• Design, build, and deploy internal AI-enabled solutions using enterprise platforms such as Claude Code, Glean, retrieval-based systems, agentic workflows, and orchestration frameworks. 
• Create reusable patterns, prompts, skills, templates, runbooks, and reference implementations so successful approaches can be adopted repeatedly; help business teams replace repetitive administrative effort with AI-assisted workflows while preserving the human judgment and relationships that matter most. 
• Work closely with engineering, data, security, compliance, and clinical stakeholders to ensure AI solutions are safe, governed, maintainable, and appropriate for regulated healthcare environments. 
• Influence enterprise AI tool selection, evaluation, rollout, and usage standards based on hands-on experience and measurable business impact. 
• Train and enable both technical and non-technical users on how to use AI tools effectively, responsibly, and with the right expectations for quality, risk, and oversight. 
• Communicate complex AI concepts clearly to executives, clinicians, operators, and frontline teams, translating technical tradeoffs into plain language and practical decisions. 
• Measure and communicate the impact of AI deployments using operational, productivity, quality, and user adoption metrics. 
• Serve as an internal evangelist for AI transformation by leading workshops, demos, and office hours; continuously improve how Strive works with AI by sharing lessons learned and recommending where to invest next. 
• Meet in person with internal and/or external stakeholders to facilitate team and business priorities/opportunities. Business travel may be required for opportunities to connect with stakeholders and attend Strive-sponsored team events. 

Minimum Qualifications 

• Bachelor's Degree in computer science, engineering, data science, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience. 
• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, machine learning engineering, data engineering, solutions engineering, or a closely related field. 
• 2+ years of hands-on experience building and deploying AI-powered systems, including generative AI, retrieval-augmented systems, agentic workflows, or AI-enabled automations. 
• Demonstrated ability to operate as a senior individual contributor in ambiguous environments, independently driving work from problem framing through deployment and adoption. 
• Strong software engineering fundamentals with practical experience building production-quality tools, services, or workflows. 
• Experience partnering directly with business stakeholders to translate operational pain points into technical solutions. 
• Ability to communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical audiences and to influence without formal authority. 
• Internet Connectivity - Min Speeds: 3.8Mbps/3.0Mbps (up/down); Latency < 60 ms. 
• Ability to travel and be onsite to meet business needs. 

Preferred Qualifications 

• Experience working in healthcare, value-based care, or another regulated environment with meaningful privacy, security, and governance requirements. 
• Strong hands-on experience with enterprise AI platforms and tools such as Claude Code, Glean, coding assistants, agent frameworks, and workflow orchestration tools. 
• Experience building internal AI copilots, automation tools, knowledge systems, or agentic applications that support operational or clinical teams. 
• Strong Python skills and experience with cloud-based data and application workflows, ideally in AWS. 
• Practical experience with retrieval-augmented generation, prompt and context design, evaluation methods, and guardrails for production AI systems. 
• Experience operating in a forward-deployed, solutions engineering, field engineering, or internal consulting model where speed, judgment, and stakeholder trust are critical. 
• Track record of influencing tool standards, implementation patterns, and adoption practices across multiple teams. 
• Experience designing and delivering training, workshops, or enablement programs for users with a wide range of technical backgrounds. 
• Experience evaluating AI vendors, tools, and architectures with a pragmatic lens on value, risk, usability, and maintainability. 
• Familiarity with healthcare data, clinical workflows, and collaboration with compliance, security, and legal stakeholders. 

About You  

• You have strong judgment about what to build, what not to build, and how to maximize practical value from AI inside a real business. 
• You are highly hands-on and enjoy turning messy operating problems into working systems that people actually use. 
• You are energized by working side-by-side with teams, earning trust quickly, and helping others adopt better ways of working. 
• You are a clear communicator who can move comfortably between engineers, operators, clinicians, and executives. 
• You are excited by change and bring a bias toward action, experimentation, and continuous improvement. 
• You are thoughtful about safety, governance, and risk, especially when deploying AI into sensitive workflows and data environments. 
• You are team-first, low-ego, and motivated by enterprise impact more than ownership boundaries. 
• You are passionate about helping Strive become an AI-native company. 

Annual Salary Range: $130,000 - $196,000