Principal Machine Learning Engineer

Job description

We are looking for a Principal Machine Learning Engineer to join our remote-first team, in a New Zealand & US friendly timezone. You will be leading from the front on our ML efforts, ensuring that our AI-powered product features, both now and in the future, provide the best possible support to patients through their hospital journey.

Vital’s software keeps patients informed during an ER or Hospital visit: AI-powered wait time estimation, human-centered explanation of labs, AI-matched video education, AI-powered medical-to-plain-English translation, and clear step-by-step instructions on what to do next.

It’s working well. We serve 3M+ patients each year, across over 100 hospitals.

This Role

Principal Engineers at Vital get sh*t done. In this role you will be working directly with our CTO; you’ll set the technical direction of our ML function; and you’ll also be writing code. This is not the kind of Principal role that requires you to be in meetings 5 hours a day so if you’re currently not on the tools this won’t be the role for you. We move fast - there are no hoops to jump through, or red tape to cut. We ship to production multiple times a day. We design software that is simple yet effective and your work will positively impact millions of patients and their families.

As the technical lead of our Machine Learning function, you’ll be responsible for:

- Owning the day-to-day execution of ML engineering initiatives, focusing on productionising and scaling ML solutions rather than research. So you will organise and run the discipline to ensure smooth delivery of production ready models.

- Providing engineering leadership on individual projects while remaining deeply technical; writing code, architecting solutions, and leveraging your software engineering background to build robust ML systems.

- Acting as the engineering voice in conversations with medical and operations stakeholders, pushing back on hypothetical “couldn’t we just…” requests by grounding discussions in technical reality.

Some fun data points that we’re working with:

4 million events per day

750k LLM invocations per week

13k visits a day extrapolates to over 4 million hospital visits a year

As a remote-first company, the successful candidate can be based anywhere in New Zealand (or eastern parts of Australia). Vital has embraced a remote-first way of working, and our team is empowered to work wherever suits them (with a few IRL moments too of course).

Engineering & ML at Vital

• Our engineers are responsible for maintaining and developing our customer-facing products, and internal tools that support them.
• You will design, build and maintain features using a modern, serverless stack. All of our infrastructure rests within the AWS cloud, with our preference being AWS Managed Services, allowing our engineers to build products rather than maintain servers. Our products consist of full-stack serverless mobile web applications built with React and arranged with SST and Nx.
• We ingest and process millions of events from core healthcare systems using AWS Serverless technologies like Lambda, SQS, and EventBridge, as well as OpenSearch for operational insights.
• Code is deployed to production via CI/CD multiple times every day, with multiple layers of automated testing and code analysis in place. We prefer to catch potential issues as early as possible, so we continuously invest in our Developer Experience tooling and observability.
• AI agents are a big part of our development workflow, and the team frequently makes use of them from brainstorming to delivery.
• Engineers build, maintain, and support shared services, and we maintain an on-call roster across the wider Engineering team.
• Work is prioritized and delivered using a Kanban-style approach, and we iterate on our methodology as needed. Changes are delivered iteratively, making use of feature flags so that we can pilot them with a subset of customers and validate them.

Responsibilities

• Identify opportunities to enhance existing product features through ML improvements and evaluate new models for production readiness, with a focus on platform scalability and maintainability.
• Design and implement ML infrastructure including SageMaker pipelines for model retraining, establish architectural patterns, and develop safety frameworks for responsible AI usage including GenAI applications.
• Manage ML project timelines and deliverables, communicate progress and technical challenges to executive stakeholders, and serve as the engineering partner to product delivery leads in translating ideas into production reality.
• Work flexibly across different team arrangements (without requiring dedicated ML engineering reports), prioritizing impact on business outcomes and product features over traditional hierarchical structures.
• Stay connected to ML research developments to inform practical engineering decisions, while maintaining focus on production implementation rather than pure research.

Benefits

• Every team member at Vital gets to share in our success in the form of stock options.
• We’ll provide you with the equipment you’ll need to work remotely or in a shared office space.
• Annual L&D budget to support your career development & a stipend for your home office set up!
• Employee Assistance Program to support your wellbeing.
• Paid Parental Leave.
• We’re working on problems which have a real impact on people’s lives. When we succeed, patients get better care.
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are important to us. Every team member must abide by our shared code of conduct. We believe this approach will help us attract and grow a diverse bunch of talented people that are supportive, calm, clear, empathetic, and results-oriented.
• We prefer working smarter, not longer. You’re not expected to put in wild hours, that’s just not what we do.
• We’re constantly improving our systems and processes, and you’ll be expected to continue to shape this as we journey together.

Hiring @ Vital

Does this role seem like a good opportunity for you? If so, have a read of our code of conduct, then fill out an application. Once we’ve received your application, we’ll send through some technical challenges and puzzles for you to work through in your own time (they shouldn’t take too long to complete). From there, we will be in touch.

If you qualify for a role at Vital, we’ll invite you to a round of interviews. There are three stages to our interview process, as follows:

Culture & Screening. This is where you introduce yourself, and we introduce ourselves and the company, explaining what we’re about, why we’re doing what we’re doing, and the type of person we’re looking for.

Technical. This is where we’ll sit with you to talk about technical problems relevant to the role you’re applying for, looking to see if you can demonstrate the skills required to fulfil the role.

Executive. This is where you get to meet our leadership team and ask questions about the company and its founders/leadership team.

We are committed to providing all candidates with constructive feedback during this process.

Vital was founded with the goal of providing modern healthcare software to providers and patients everywhere, regardless of identity or circumstances. We’re striving to build a diverse and inclusive team who are equally as passionate about our mission as we are - that being said, if you are excited about improving healthcare and patient experiences, but don’t think you tick every box in our job ad, please still consider applying - we’d love to hear from you.

Vital is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive culture and celebrate authenticity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, or any other legally protected characteristics.