Vice President of Engineering, Core AI

Join us as we work to create a thriving ecosystem that delivers accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all.

Vice President of Engineering, Core AI

Location: Hybrid work model anchored to our Boston, MA office location.

About the Role: We are seeking a visionary and dynamic Vice President of Engineering to lead our AI Core team. This team serves as the center of excellence for AI at athenahealth, providing foundational AI platforms, expert guidance across key AI domains, and partnering with product teams embedding AI capabilities. The AI core team plays an essential role in harnessing artificial intelligence to transform our products for electronic health records, revenue cycle management, patient engagement, population health and payer services.

As a strategic leader and organizational connector, the VP of AI Engineering in collaboration with product management will drive the overall AI vision, technical direction, platform excellence, and collaborative engagement across R&D to enable innovative AI solutions that are accurate, scalable, and safe.

This is a unique opportunity to shape the future of AI at athenahealth by leading a small but highly impactful team at the heart of our innovative efforts. If you are a builder, connector, and visionary leader ready to drive meaningful changes in healthcare through AI, we invite you to apply.

Reporting To: Executive Vice President, Product Engineering

Key Responsibilities:

1. Leadership & Vision

• Lead a high-performing, multidisciplinary engineering team focused on foundational AI capabilities and infrastructure.
• Bring experience running AI Research Labs or Centers of Excellence at leading technology companies that publish academic papers, file patents, and shape AI innovation.
• Act as a hybrid technical leader and people manager, contributing deep subject matter expertise while developing organizational capability and reliably delivering AI platforms and services.
• Define and evolve the vision and strategic roadmap for AI platforms and services, balancing first-party development and third-party integrations.
• Establish thought leadership and elevate the market perception of athenahealth as a leader in AI.

2. Subject Matter Expertise

• Direct the AI Core team’s research staff/program to ensure we stay current on advancements in foundational models, AI evaluation/verification, agent-based systems, and human-AI interaction.
• Stay current on US healthcare relevant AI regulations and best practices for responsible AI and incorporate into our AI governance process.
• Participate in external industry forums and engage with key partners and customers.

3. Platform & Infrastructure

• Provide application teams governed access to ML/AI platforms and infrastructure, enabling secure, compliant, cost-effective, and high-performing use of innovative ML/AI models. This includes classic machine learning operations (MLOps) and foundational model operations (FMOps).
• Curate an opinionated model garden that will include third party commercial and open-source models, along with in-house developed models. Models will support language, vision, and audio/speech modalities.
• Provide environments for in-house model development and foundational model fine tuning including related capabilities such as quantization and distillation.
• Provide required platforms & infrastructure to enable techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and Mixture of Experts (MoE) approaches to inferencing.
• Define and enforce AI governance to ensure we stay compliant with regulatory requirements and follow responsible AI practices.

4. Organizational connector & AI ecosystem architect

• Serve as a strategic partner and SME to product teams embedding AI in electronic health record, practice management, revenue cycle management, population health, patient engagement and payer services products. Help guide product teams to adopt best practice architecture, design & implementation.
• Facilitate collaboration between the Core AI teams MLOps/FMOps platform team, AI researchers, product team engineers & product managers, clinical safety, regulatory, and legal stakeholders.
• Understand the product teams needs for AI model modalities (language, vision, audio, multimodal), model types (base/chat/instruct), model characteristics (context size, latency, cost…) to drive the curation of athenahealth's model garden.
• Understand the product team needs for Agentic AI systems and help ensure we have a consistent approach that ensures verifiable, explainable, and interoperable agentic AI systems.
• Establish standardized tools, frameworks, reference patterns and best practices for application teams to consume as they embed AI throughout their products. Emphasis should be placed on providing strong guidance on prompt engineering techniques, grounding techniques and validation techniques to ensure accuracy when using non-deterministic foundational models.
• Develop the R&D teams’ AI capabilities through education and talent development. The Core AI team will define and deliver continuous AI education for the broad R&D org.

Qualifications:

• 15+ years of engineering leadership experience, including managing high-performing teams and delivering platform-level services.

Demonstrated experience in leading AI research laboratories or innovation centers at prominent technology firms.

• Demonstrated technical expertise in AI/ML infrastructure and systems, including foundational models, agent frameworks, and scalable MLOps & FMOps.
• Deep understanding of the AI product lifecycle, including prompt engineering, RAG, verification, and multimodal interaction.
• Effective collaborator with experience leading cross-functional projects and simplifying technical topics for diverse audiences.
• Expertise in creating public-facing SaaS AI/ML products.
• Passion for AI ethics, safety, and responsible innovation.

Preferred:

• Experience in the healthcare domain or business applications domain.
• Experience in scaled R&D orgs (>1000 engineers) that are globally distributed.
• Experience with large-scale SaaS applications (billions of transactions a day & petabytes of data) and cloud native computing architectures.

About athenahealth: Our vision is to create a thriving ecosystem that delivers accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all. We pursue this through our medical record, revenue cycle, patient engagement, population health and payer services. athenahealth partners with healthcare organizations across the care continuum to drive clinical and financial results. Our expert teams build modern technology on an open, connected ecosystem, yielding insights that make a difference for our customers and their patients. We integrate AI throughout our product offerings to drive the efficiency of administrative and financial processes and improve the user experience for providers and patients.

About athenahealth

Here’s our vision: To create a thriving ecosystem that delivers accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all.  

What’s unique about our locations? 
From an historic, 19th century arsenal to a converted, landmark power plant, all of athenahealth’s offices were carefully chosen to represent our innovative spirit and promote the most positive and productive work environment for our teams. Our 10 offices across the United States and India — plus numerous remote employees — all work to modernize the healthcare experience, together. 
 
Our company culture might be our best feature. 
We don't take ourselves too seriously. But our work? That’s another story. athenahealth develops and implements products and services that support US healthcare: It’s our chance to create healthier futures for ourselves, for our family and friends, for everyone.  

Our vibrant and talented employees — or athenistas, as we call ourselves — spark the innovation and passion needed to accomplish our goal. We continue to expand our workforce with amazing people who bring diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives at every level, and foster an environment where every athenista feels comfortable bringing their best selves to work. 

Our size makes a difference, too: We are small enough that your individual contributions will stand out — but large enough to grow your career with our resources and established business stability. 
 
Giving back is integral to our culture. Our athenaGives platform strives to support food security, expand access to high-quality healthcare for all, and support STEM education to develop providers and technologists who will provide access to high-quality healthcare for all in the future. As part of the evolution of athenahealth’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) program, we’ve selected nonprofit partners that align with our purpose and let us foster long-term partnerships for charitable giving, employee volunteerism, insight sharing, collaboration, and cross-team engagement.   

What can we do for you? 
Along with health and financial benefits, athenistas enjoy perks specific to each location, including commuter support, employee assistance programs, tuition assistance, employee resource groups, and collaborative workspaces — some offices even welcome dogs.  

In addition to our traditional benefits and perks, we sponsor events throughout the year, including book clubs, external speakers, and hackathons. And we provide athenistas with a company culture based on learning, the support of an engaged team, and an inclusive environment where all employees are valued.  

We also encourage a better work-life balance for athenistas with our flexibility. While we know in-office collaboration is critical to our vision, we recognize that not all work needs to be done within an office environment, full-time. With consistent communication and digital collaboration tools, athenahealth enables employees to find a balance that feels fulfilling and productive for each individual situation. 

athenahealth is committed to a policy of equal employment opportunity—that’s why we recruit and hire applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, disability, age, sexual orientation, veteran status, genetic information, gender identity, gender expression, or any other factor prohibited by law. We’re happy to provide a reasonable accommodation, for those with a disability, to complete any part of the application process. If you are unable to access or use this online application process and need an alternative method for applying, please contact us at taoperations@athenahealth.com for assistance.

https://www.athenahealth.com/careers/equal-opportunity