Manager, AI Platform - Applied AI

Virta Health is on a mission to transform diabetes care and reverse the type 2 diabetes epidemic. Current treatment approaches aren’t working—over half of US adults have either type 2 diabetes or prediabetes. Virta is changing this by helping people reverse type 2 diabetes 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 live diabetes-free. Join us on our mission to reverse diabetes in 100M people by 2025.

As a full stack health care company of physicians, engineers, marketers and more under one roof, Virta collects comprehensive data on our patients’ experience. The Applied AI team leverages this data to build the next generation of health care for chronic diseases. We build and interpret intelligent systems that power our product in order to scale the treatment, drive patient acquisition, and improve patient outcomes.

We strive to be a self-reliant, full-stack AI team. As the manager responsible for our AI/ML platform, you will lead a team that develops essential tooling, services, and frameworks to accelerate all parts of the machine learning lifecycle. In addition to reliability, performance, and user ergonomics, you will meet the growing needs of ML engineers as they develop more complex models and data products than was previously possible with our existing tooling.

This is a new investment area for Applied AI; you will hire a small team in 2022, demonstrate early wins against our ambitious AI roadmap, and continue to scale the team in 2023. The ideal candidate has built internal platforms before, and gets energy from helping colleagues train, deploy, and operate production AI systems with less friction.

Check out our technical blog to find out how Virta is developing the next generation of healthcare technology: https://www.virtahealth.com/health-tech

Responsibilities

• Lead the team’s thinking in building extensible, self-service tooling and platforms across areas, including (but not limited to):
  • Model Development: Enable faster and richer model dev iterations via GPU acceleration, distributed training, and supporting a broad ecosystem of ML frameworks. Improve the speed and scalability of our data processing capabilities with Cloud technologies like Dataflow.
  • Model Serving: Define patterns to serve multi-model systems at varying latency requirements (e.g. to support daily batch pipelines or low-latency inference)
  • ML Ops: Lead the team in critical technical choices, such as how we approach production model monitoring, ML-native CI/CD practices, and model lifecycle management.
• Forge close relationships with senior technical leaders from infrastructure and product engineering. Drive towards strong service contracts across Virta’s technology organization so Applied AI team members can ship autonomously with minimal handoffs.
• Hire a small team in 2022 and demonstrate early wins against our ambitious roadmap, and continue to scale the team in 2023
  

90 Day Plan

Within your first 90 days at Virta, we expect you will do the following:

• Develop the vision and direction of the team with the Head of Applied AI
• Draft a roadmap for our tooling and infrastructure. Develop opinions on what we should build vs. buy
• Help us deploy one new ML product or make a major modification to an existing ML product.
• Work with team members to enable efficiency improvements across their ML related tasks
• Teach and inspire other Applied AI team members on your areas of expertise through knowledge sharing, pair programming, and code reviews
  

Must-Haves

• You have 6+ years of experience as a backend, infrastructure, data, or ML engineer with experience applying your skills to develop an AI/ML platform.
• You have 2+ years of managing backend, infrastructure, data, or ML engineers.
• You are passionate about designing scalable, fault tolerant machine learning systems that interact directly with production traffic
• You understand the fundamentals of machine learning, enough to partner with Machine Learning Engineers to incorporate their evolving needs into our platform
• You have experience with modern data processing technologies like Apache Spark or Apache Beam, and/or model serving technologies like Kubeflow, Seldon Core, or Ray Serve
• You excel at communicating progress, trade-offs, and the results of your work to team members from other functions
  

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

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.