Senior AI/ML Backend Engineer

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!

• 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

• 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