Staff Software Engineer I, AI Transformation

Our mission: eliminating every barrier to mental health.

Spring Health is a global mental health company on a mission to eliminate every barrier to mental health. We're building a world where getting support is simple, personal, and built around the person, so care can continue through every job, move, health plan, and life stage.
Our AI-native platform helps us deliver personalized support across self-guided tools, coaching, therapy, medication management, and specialty care. With outcomes independently validated by JAMA Network Open and the Validation Institute, Spring Health reaches more than 170 million people worldwide through leading employers, health plans, and partners.
As an AI-native company, we believe technology should expand the reach, quality, and humanity of care. Every Spring Health team member is expected to use AI tools thoughtfully, apply human judgment to AI outputs, and keep building AI fluency in ways that support their role and our mission.

Reporting to the Senior Manager, Engineering, AI Tooling & Enablement, this Staff Software Engineer will lead architecture and technical strategy for AI transformation. You will translate broad product and organizational visions into scalable, modular system architectures, and act as a critical partner to Product, Engineering, and cross-functional leaders to build scalable, future-proof platform capabilities with speed, quality, and precision. This role is part of the AI Transformation & Platform Engineering team and is instrumental in modernizing our technologies through AI-driven capabilities spanning UI, harnesses, models, connectors, and governance accelerating delivery and business impact across the org.

Please note that this is a hybrid role based in New York City, with an expectation to be in the office 2–3 days per week at our 60 Madison Avenue location. Candidates must be based in the NYC metro area or able to relocate independently within 90 days of their start date. Occasional travel will be required for team on-sites.

What you’ll do

• Lead hands-on experimentation, evaluation, and production rollout of modern AI capabilities, frameworks, and workflows (LLMs, model gateways, retrieval systems) across the engineering & enterprise platforms

• Identify recurring systemic breakdowns in the software development lifecycle and design simpler, faster, higher-quality approaches to raise the bar for code quality, system resilience, and operational health

• Take ownership of a team’s architecture—providing system-wide design guidance, decomposing software architecture into discrete components, and ensuring sound tradeoffs across competing dimensions.

• Produce architecture that is exemplary in terms of efficiency, stability, extensibility, and the ability to evolve; designs reflect strategic vision, awareness of non-functional requirements, and future product flexibility.

• Use AI to explore and validate architectural patterns and decisions; design AI-augmented workflows (e.g., automated code generation, incident analysis) that multiply team output and enable engineers at all levels to work more effectively.

• Establish guardrails for safe and responsible AI usage across your team, covering security, compliance, and output correctness.

• Drive best practices across the organization; lead initiatives to eliminate tech debt and prepare the codebase for future roadmap requirements.

• Critically influence large, cross-team projects—ensuring execution without delay or compromise, and anticipating and removing barriers of all kinds.

• Bring critical thinking and drive shared understanding in ambiguous situations; given a clear vision, create a strategy; given a clear strategy, define a sequence of objectives.

• Provide a system-wide view to the engineers you work with; share architectural improvements across the tech org to build buy-in and drive broad implementation.

• Develop strong working relationships cross-functionally and with business stakeholders; make sound tradeoffs between competing needs across short- and long-term horizons.

• Empower engineers to set ambitious goals and turn vision into reality; mentor and develop engineers across the organization, not just your immediate team.

• Handle operational escalations reliably; lead high-stakes investigations calmly and communicate progress clearly to stakeholders.

• Participate in an on-call rotation; push for better preparation and planning to reduce the frequency and impact of production incidents.

• Serve as a trusted technical thought leader across Engineering, Product, Security, IT, and other functional stakeholders—aligning partners early, clarifying tradeoffs, and navigating project dependencies and risks

AI Fluency Expectations

• Uses AI to explore and validate architectural patterns and decisions that improve system scalability and reliability, and reduce operational cost

• Multiplies team output by enabling others to effectively use AI

• Designs and implements AI-augmented workflows (e.g., automated code generation, incident analysis) that materially reduce the amount of time, manual overhead and cost required for teams to ship code

• Maintains R&D context for AI best practices and approaches

• Actively directs AI strategy and resources to build, ship, or accelerate enterprise initiatives, ensuring material business impact is delivered as defined by their leveling expectations.

• Understands AI's strategic implications for software engineering: how AI shifts development velocity, quality expectations, and the skills a high-performing engineering team needs

• Familiar with the enterprise AI tooling landscape: what categories of tools exist (coding assistants, test generators, AI ops platforms), how to evaluate them, what governance they require

• Understands AI risk at the organizational level: security, compliance, quality, and reputational considerations for enterprise-wide AI use in engineering

• Knows what AI-native engineering organizations look like and can articulate where Spring Health stands in that landscape

What success looks like in this role

• Architectural Ownership – You are responsible for a team’s architecture. Your designs are exemplary—others reference them as the standard for engineering excellence across the org.

• AI-Augmented Engineering – You design workflows and tooling that make AI a force multiplier for your team. You establish guardrails that keep AI usage safe, compliant, and high-quality.

• Strategic Clarity – You turn vision into strategy and strategy into objectives. You bring structure and shared understanding to the most ambiguous problems on your team and across the org.

• Cross-Org Influence – You drive best practices beyond your immediate team. Engineers and leaders across the organization seek your input on the hardest technical problems.

• Engineering Excellence – You lead large-scale initiatives to reduce tech debt, improve architecture, and raise the quality bar. You leave every system better than you found it.

• People & Org Health – You empower engineers to do their best work—providing proper context, mentoring across levels, and fostering an inclusive, high-trust culture.

• Operational Reliability – You handle escalations reliably and lead high-stakes investigations with calm, clear communication. You drive systemic improvements to reduce future incidents.

What you’ll bring

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience

• Deep expertise in Python, prompt engineering, developing AI agents, and AWS cloud infrastructure; experience with our tech stack of TypeScript, React and Ruby on Rails is preferred

• Proven experience designing and owning Fullstack platform architecture at scale

• Uses AI to explore and validate architectural decisions, design AI-augmented engineering workflows, and establish quality and safety guardrails for AI-assisted work across a team

• Track record of technical leadership: creating clarity from ambiguity, defining strategy from vision, and driving org-wide architectural improvements

• Experience leading and influencing cross-functional teams and stakeholders at multiple levels

• Demonstrated ability to mentor and develop engineers across the organization

• Adept at covering the breadth of technology while diving deep into architectural complexity and scalability

• At least 2+ years of hands-on experience experimenting with, integrating, or architecting modern AI tools, LLMs, model gateways, or retrieval systems into software applications

• At least 2+ years leading architectural direction and project teams that span across multiple domains & functions

• Bonus: Prior experience building technology within regulated or complex domains (healthcare or adjacent industries preferred)

Note: We have even more benefits than listed here and below, your recruiter will provide more in-depth information as you continue in the interview process. Benefits are subject to individual plan requirements and eligibility criteria.

• Health, Dental, Vision benefits start on your first day at Spring. You and your dependents also receive access to One Medical accounts HSA and FSA plans are also available, with Spring contributing up to $1K for HSAs, depending on your plan type.

• Employer sponsored 401(k) match of up to 2% for retirement planning

• A yearly allotment of no cost visits to the Spring Health network of therapists, coaches, and medication management providers for you and your dependents.

• We offer competitive paid time off policies including vacation, sick leave and company holidays.

• At 6 months tenure with Spring, we offer parental leave of 18 weeks for birthing parents and 16 weeks for non-birthing parents.

• Access to Noom, a weight management program—based in psychology, that’s tailored to your unique needs and goals.

• Access to fertility care support through Carrot, in addition to $4,000 reimbursement for related fertility expenses.

• Access to Wellhub, which connects employees to the best options for fitness, mindfulness, nutrition, and sleep in one subscription

• Access to BrightHorizons, which provides sponsored child care, back-up care, and elder care

• Up to $1,000 Professional Development Reimbursement a year.

• $200 per year donation matching to support your favorite causes.

Not sure if you meet every requirement? Research shows that women and people from historically underrepresented communities often hesitate to apply for roles unless they meet every qualification compared to other similarly-qualified candidates. At Spring Health, we are committed to fostering a workplace where everyone feels valued, empowered, and supported to Thrive. If this role excites you, we encourage you to apply.

Our privacy policy:

Spring Health is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, pregnancy, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with applicable legal requirements. Spring Health is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.