Senior Engineer II, Machine Learning

Virta Health is on a mission to reverse metabolic disease in one billion people. Current treatment approaches aren’t working—over half of US adults have either type 2 diabetes or prediabetes, and obesity rates are at an all-time high. Virta is changing this by helping people reverse their metabolic condition through innovations in technology, personalized nutrition, and virtual care delivery reinvented from the ground up.

We have raised over $350 million from top-tier investors, and partner with the largest health plans, employers, and government organizations to help their employees and members restore their health and take back their lives. Join us on our mission to reverse metabolic disease in one billion people. As a Senior Engineer II, Machine Learning on Virta's Applied AI team, you own how predictive ML and GenAI combine into a single platform, one that shifts Virta's AI capability from linear to exponential and drives real clinical outcomes.

You see the opportunity in the data, frame it for the team, and drive it from inception to production. You thrive in collaboration and align partners across Product Engineering, ML Ops, and Product Analytics around a clear technical path. Rather than shipping isolated models or monolithic GenAI applications, you architect reusable platform capabilities, combining predictive risk and intervention signals with adaptive GenAI execution into a continuous feedback loop that measurably improves clinical outcomes and retention.

You hold a high bar for scientific rigor, balanced by a bias toward impact. Rather than catching leakage, bias, and confounding case by case, you engineer them out. You design the evaluation frameworks, guardrails, and best practices that make them structurally hard to introduce and raise the whole team's rigor by default. You're the kind of engineer who'd rather build the capability ten teams reuse than the model one feature needs.

At this level you set the technical standard for Applied AI at Virta, mentoring ML and software engineers and owning high-velocity delivery across multi-quarter horizons. RESPONSIBILITIES - Business Problem Framing: Independently translate complex clinical and operational business problems into cohesive Applied AI roadmaps. Align leadership, product squads, and cross-functional partners around strategic ML and GenAI investments tied to company-level OKRs. - Causal ML & Intervention Effectiveness: Lead the design and implementation of causal ML strategies, validating models against real clinical experiments to quantify what types of coaching or digital interventions work best for specific member segments. - Model & Signal Integration: Design predictive ML models and GenAI-derived signals (e.g., conversation subtext analysis) that feed as clean, modular inputs into product features. - GenAI Platformization: Guide the evolution of monolithic GenAI applications into reusable platform capabilities that other product engineering teams can leverage.

Examples may include member context retrieval, safety/compliance guardrails, treatment-guideline grounding, and chatbot orchestration. - Cross-Pillar Technical Architecture: Own technical architectures spanning traditional ML and GenAI platformization. Lead discovery and design for high-leverage initiatives like Next Best Action support for care teams and triage. - Scientific Rigor & Experimentation: Partner closely with Product Analytics to apply advanced variance-reduction techniques (CUPED/CUPAC) and continuous evaluation frameworks, sharpening experiment sensitivity and accelerating experiment cycle times. - Technical Standards & Mentorship: Set and enforce high standards for AI/ML engineering, code quality, model evaluation, and safety guardrails across the org.

MUST HAVES - 8+ years of experience developing and deploying production-grade Machine Learning systems, with proven technical leadership across multi-quarter initiatives. - Experience applying causal inference and causal ML frameworks (e.g., Double ML, CATE estimation, instrumental variables, or uplift modeling) to real-world observational and experimental data. - Strong foundation across traditional ML (predictive modeling, tree-based models like XGBoost, time-series analysis on structured longitudinal data). - Experience building modern GenAI architectures (LLM integration, RAG, evaluation, safety guardrails). - Outstanding technical communication skills: ability to translate complex AI concepts into clear business strategy for senior executives, product partners, and clinical stakeholders. - Experience establishing responsible, high-leverage practices for AI-assisted development.

NICE TO HAVES - Background in clinical or health-tech ML, patient outcomes prediction, risk stratification, biomarker modeling, or similar domains. - Experience designing reusable platform capabilities or shared services, rather than isolated single-use models or point applications. - Prior experience leading or managing ML teams, with a desire to return to deep technical impact as a senior individual contributor. VALUES-DRIVEN CULTURE Virta's company values drive our culture, so you'll do well if: - You put people first and take care of yourself, your peers, and our patients equally - You have a strong sense of ownership and take initiative while empowering others to do the same - You prioritize positive impact over busy work - You have no ego and understand that everyone has something to bring to the table regardless of experience - You appreciate transparency and promote trust and empowerment through open access of information - You are evidence-based and prioritize data and science over seniority or dogma - You take risks and rapidly iterate Is this role not quite what you're looking for?

Join our Talent Community https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/virtahealth/form/talent-community-form and follow us on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/company/virta-health to stay connected! Virta has a location based compensation structure. Starting pay will be based on a number of factors and commensurate with qualifications & experience. For this role, the compensation range is $161,500 to $232,500. Information about Virta’s benefits is on our Careers page at: https://www.virtahealth.com/careers.

As part of your duties at Virta, you may come in contact with sensitive patient information that is governed by HIPAA. Throughout your career at Virta, you will be expected to follow Virta's security and privacy procedures to ensure our patients' information remains strictly confidential. Security and privacy training will be provided. As a remote-first company, our team is spread across various locations with office hubs in Denver and San Francisco.

Clinical roles: We currently do not hire in the following states: AK, HI, RI Corporate roles: We currently do not hire in the following states: AK, DE, HI, ME, MS, OK, SD, VT. Virta uses Ashby as its applicant tracking system, which incorporates AI-powered tools (provided by OpenAI, AWS, and Google Gemini) in certain aspects of the recruiting process, including application review, candidate screening, and interview note taking; your data is not used to train AI models, and all final hiring decisions are made by Virta Health personnel.

For more information, see Virta’s AI Interview Resources page. https://www.virtahealth.com/careers/ai-interview-resources