Job Specifications
About Avant-garde Health
We are a mission-driven organization that was born out of the health care research at Harvard Business School led by Michael Porter and Bob Kaplan. We provide health systems, surgery centers, and physicians with comprehensive insight into their surgical care through our software and empower them to improve their finances and deliver the best care possible to their patients. We integrate sophisticated analytics with deep industry knowledge. We are thought leaders and our impactful work in improving health care efficiency and effectiveness has been recognized and featured in publications like the Harvard Business Review and The Wall Street Journal. We are well capitalized and backed by leading VCs, including General Catalyst, Founder Collective, Fulcrum Equity Partners and Tectonic Ventures. Join us in our mission to reshape health care through innovation and insight.
Position Overview
We are hiring an AI/LLM Engineer to help transform how hospital stakeholders interact with data -- using natural language, intelligent agents, and generative AI capabilities. You'll join a small, fast-moving team working on cutting-edge language model applications directly integrated into our flagship analytics platform, CareMeasurement.
This is a new, hands-on role where you'll be empowered to ship features with real-world impact. You'll collaborate closely with the product team to extend our current LLM-based chat functionality, build agentic workflows (e.g. data-driven recommendations, email/presentation generation), and explore the frontier of "why" question answering in healthcare analytics.
Key Responsibilities
Design, prototype, and productionize AI-powered features using LLMs and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
Extend our natural language interface to support more complex queries and agentic tasks (e.g. summarizing cost savings opportunities, generating reports or presentations, notifying users).
Build orchestration layers around OpenAI's APIs and internal data pipelines for reliable and explainable AI responses.
Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, clinical experts, and backend engineers to deliver seamless, user-focused AI experiences.
Monitor and evaluate model performance and user feedback to guide iteration.
Stay current with LLM and AI trends, and propose pragmatic applications within our domain.
Qualifications
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
2+ years of experience building backend or data-intensive applications, preferably in a SaaS environment.
1+ years working directly with frontier language models (e.g. OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic), including prompt engineering and API orchestration.
Strong Python skills and experience building production-grade features or services.
Familiarity with vector databases and RAG patterns (e.g. Postgres/pgvector or similar).
Bonus Skills
Experience with Django, MySQL, and AWS.
Familiarity with healthcare data or HIPAA-compliant systems.
Important Note:
In order for your application to be considered complete, please write a paragraph or two describing a product you have built with LLMs (e.g., OpenAI GPT-4, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini). In your response, highlight the technical approach you took (such as prompt engineering, embeddings, fine-tuning, evaluation, or deployment pipeline) and send it in your own words to my email: nick[at]avantgardehealth[dot]com.
About the Company
Founded in 2014, Avant-garde Health partners with leading health care providers committed to improving the value of care. Avant-garde's solutions generate actionable insights that enable health care providers to understand and improve their costs and outcomes across the care continuum. Avant-garde Health grew out of the Harvard Business School's value-based health care delivery research, led by Professors Michael Porter and Robert Kaplan.
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