Lead AI Engineer

Overview
St. Jude is where those with a passion for making a difference come to break new ground. Located in Memphis, Tennessee, the mission of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is to advance cures, and means of prevention, for pediatric catastrophic diseases through research and treatment. We are leading the way the world understands, treats and defeats childhood cancer and other lifethreatening diseases. We are looking for a Lead AI Engineer to join our Analytics Services team in supporting this incredible work.

The Lead AI Engineer will play a pivotal role in advancing healthcare artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives by developing and training AI tools aimed at automating and optimizing clinical workflows, operational efficiencies, and administrative tasks. As part of our dynamic team, your expertise in AI and other cognitive computing methodologies, such as but not limited to machine learning (ML), large language models (LLMs), small language models (SLMs), natural language processing (NLP), Generative AI, and Agentic AI, will help revolutionize pediatric healthcare. This is your opportunity to design, develop, and deploy innovative AI solutions that directly enhance patient and family outcomes and leverage innovation to transform operational and administrative practices.

A day in the life of the Lead AI Engineer includes working with institutional stakeholders to deploy and integrate sophisticated AI systems, rigorously testing, validating, and tracking learning models, and troubleshooting issues to ensure system accuracy and reliability. A core objective of this role is to implement AI solutions that closely emulate human cognitive processes, thereby enhancing the reliability and efficacy of the problems that they are intended to solve without introducing biases, legal or ethical risks. These solutions should enable resource optimization and enhance decisionmaking, ultimately to support driving fulfillment of the St. Jude mission. As a leader, you will collaborate with analytics, data scientists, IT, informatics, and business stakeholders to ensure AI systems are scalable, secure, and seamlessly integrated into existing workflows.

This position may be eligible for the possibility of remote work.

Responsibilites:

• AI Engineering Design and Collaboration: Collaborate with clinical, operational and administrative leadership and project teams to design and architect AIpowered systems that integrate with clinical and administrative platforms. Translate strategic goals into actionable AI pilot initiatives and scalable implementation plans. Consult with project teams to ensure engineering feasibility and alignment with enterprise infrastructure. Define technical requirements, APIs, and infrastructure components for deploying AI solutions. Ensure systems are modular, secure, and scalable across the institution.
• Deployment and Workflow Integration: Lead the deployment of AI solutions into production environments and ensure seamless integration with clinical and administrative systems. Collaborate with IT, informatics and clinical operations to ensure AI systems enhance – not disrupt – existing workflows. Establish monitoring protocols to ensure reliability, safety and user satisfaction. Optimize system performance, latency, and reliability in realworld clinical and operational settings.
• Governance, Reliability and Communication: Implement monitoring, logging and alerting systems to ensure AI solutions are meeting safety, compliance and other standards. Enforce responsible AI practices, including auditability, access controls and humanintheloop safeguards. Document system behavior, deployment protocols and integration are consistent with internal AI governance practices.
• Innovation and Continuous Learning: Stay current on advancements in agentic AI, cognitive architectures, and AI technologies. Evaluate emerging tools and platforms for enterprise relevance. Mentor peers and other Analytics Services staff and contribute to the development of internal best practices for AI engineering in healthcare.

• Minimum Education andor Training:

  • Master’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, data science, information technology or related field required.
  • PhD degree in data science, computer science, computer engineering, information technology or related field preferred.

  • Minimum Experience:

    • Minimum Requirement: 5 years in designing high level architectures and developing solutions for large scale AIML systems andor building solutions for a product on AIML features and capabilities.
    • 5+ years proven experience AIcognitive computing development and deployment highly preferred.
    • Previous experience in business process analysis, design, and implementation highly preferred.
    • Proficiency in AI technologies, machine learning, data analytics, and project management tools highly preferred.
    • Strong technical acumen to understand and communicate AI productfeature development requirements highly preferred.
    • Strong background in industry use cases built on deep learning and machine learning (unsupervised and supervised techniques) is a must.
    • Deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow, Keras, PyTorch, Time series analysis, anomaly detection, forecasting, predictive modeling, graph based neural networks, Bayesian statistics, and text analytics are a must.

    • Nice to Have:

      • Experience developing and integrating APIs for healthcare systems to ensure seamless interaction with AI models preferred.
      • Experience utilizing computer vision algorithms and frameworks, including medical image classification, feature matching, edge detection, image segmentation, and deep learning models like Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) preferred,

      • Knowledge and Skills:

        • Expertise in Python with libraries (e.g., Pandas, NumPy, scikitlearn, TensorFlow, Keras, spaCy, OpenCV, TPOT).
        • Experience with MLOps or similar tools for managing the lifecycle of machine learning models in healthcare applications.
        • Experience working with Epic electronic health records, including Cogito and Nebula .
        • Advanced knowledge in Machine Learning models and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for healthcare data, including word embeddings and named entity recognition.
        • Implementing and finetuning Large Language Models (LLMs) using vector bases and RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) for healthcare insights.
        • Ability to validate solution architectures for LLMs within healthcare systems, ensuring scalability and reliability.
        • Experience in deploying Generative AI (GenAI) models in production environments and providing ongoing support .
        • Familiarity with cloud platforms like Azure for deploying and scaling healthcare AI models.
        • Writing clean, efficient, and reusable code for healthcare machine learning applications.
        • Strong analytical mindset to analyze complex healthcare data, derive actionable insights, and solve problems effectively.
        • Proven ability to collaborate effectively with crossfunctional teams, explain complex concepts to nontechnical collaborators, and contribute to a positive team environment.

        • Compensation

          In recognition of certain U.S. state and municipal pay transparency laws, St. Jude is including a reasonable estimate of the compensation range for this role. This is an estimate offered in good faith and a specific salary offer takes into account factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to skill sets, experience and training, licensure and certifications, and other business and organizational needs. It is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the salary range and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current salary range is $94,640 $169,520 per year for the role of Lead AI Engineer.

          Explore our exceptional benefits!

          St. Jude is an Equal Opportunity Employer

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          St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital does not accept unsolicited assistance from search firms for employment opportunities. Please do not call or email. All resumes submitted by search firms to any employee or other representative at St. Jude via email, the internet or in any form andor method without a valid written search agreement in place and approved by HR will result in no fee being paid in the event the candidate is hired by St. Jude.