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Principal Engineer, Applied AI (Fullstack/Backend)

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Remote from
USA
Salary
USD 290k–330k / yr
Employment
Full Time
Experience
Senior
Published
Apply before
28 Nov 2026
Listing views
28
Application actions
1
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AI Summary

The role, at a glance.

Hims & Hers is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the production architecture for patient-facing Applied AI services. The role owns end-to-end service design, turning rapid AI experiments into reliable, scalable, observable production systems. This hands-on technical leader will set architecture patterns, improve operational readiness, and mentor senior engineers across the organization. Candidates need 15+ years of software engineering experience, deep distributed-systems expertise, and practical exposure to LLM or AI-powered services. Success depends on balancing near-term delivery with durable technical strategy in a healthcare-focused product environment.

Role DNA

A quick view of the complexity, pace, ownership and collaboration implied by the job description.

Job Complexity

5/5
EasyHard

Pace & Pressure

5/5
RelaxedFast-paced

Autonomy Level

5/5
GuidedFull ownership

Communication Load

5/5
IndependentCollaborative
AI insightThis is a principal-level architecture role requiring ownership of a high-impact AI platform, cross-organizational influence, and production accountability. The combination of healthcare context, AI experimentation, reliability expectations, and mentoring senior leaders makes the scope exceptionally demanding.

Salary analysis

Estimated compensation compared with the broader US market for similar roles.

Estimated job median (per year)Highly competitive
$310,000
US market range (per year)$250k–$360k
AI insightThe employer discloses a base compensation range of $290,000–$330,000 USD per year, with a midpoint of $310,000. This is a credible annual range for a US-based principal software engineering role with organization-level architecture ownership and applied AI responsibilities. Estimated US market compensation for comparable base-salary roles is approximately $250,000–$360,000 annually; total compensation may vary based on equity and incentives.

Core skills

Skills and capabilities most closely associated with this opportunity.

Sample interview questions
How would you take an LLM-powered patient interaction prototype from experimentation to a production-ready service?

I would first define the user journey, safety boundaries, latency and availability targets, and measurable quality criteria. I would then create a service architecture with versioned prompts and models, structured input and output validation, auditability, fallbacks, observability, and staged rollout controls. Before broad release, I would use offline evaluation, production shadowing, targeted monitoring, and incident playbooks to validate reliability and patient experience.

Describe how you would design observability for a patient-facing AI platform.

I would instrument the platform across product, service, and model layers. This includes request tracing, latency and error metrics, dependency health, model and prompt versions, evaluation outcomes, safe redaction of sensitive data, and dashboards tied to user-facing service-level objectives. Alerts should prioritize actionable failures, while logs and traces should enable rapid debugging without exposing unnecessary patient information.

How do you balance rapid experimentation by an AI research team with production engineering standards?

I establish a clear path from experiment to production rather than imposing heavyweight process at the prototype stage. Researchers should be able to move quickly in isolated environments, while promotion requires agreed interfaces, evaluation evidence, ownership, operational metrics, security review, and rollback mechanisms. This preserves iteration speed while ensuring production services meet reliability and safety expectations.

Give an example of how you would resolve ambiguous ownership across teams for a critical technical initiative.

I would make the problem concrete by documenting the customer impact, system boundaries, dependencies, decisions needed, and risks of inaction. I would bring the relevant leaders together, propose a pragmatic ownership model such as a directly responsible individual with named supporting teams, and convert the outcome into milestones and operating metrics. If ambiguity remains, I would escalate the decision with clear options and recommendations rather than allowing execution to stall.

What principles would guide architecture decisions for AI-enabled healthcare experiences?

I would prioritize patient safety, privacy, reliability, explainable operational behavior, and graceful degradation. Architecture should separate clinical rules and sensitive workflows from model behavior where appropriate, maintain auditable decision paths, and support controlled changes through versioning and feature flags. I would also design for long-term scale by using clear service contracts, resilient dependencies, and measurable quality standards.

This analysis is generated from the job description. Salary estimates, role characteristics and sample answers are guidance, not employer-provided facts.
Opportunity details

About this role.

Hims & Hers is the leading health and wellness platform, on a mission to help the world feel great through the power of better health. We are redefining healthcare by putting the customer first and delivering access to care that is affordable, accessible, and personal, from diagnosis to treatment to delivery. No two people are the same, so we provide access to personalized care designed for results. By normalizing health & wellness challenges and innovating on their solutions, we’re making better health outcomes easier to achieve.

Hims & Hers is a public company, traded on the NYSE under the ticker symbol “HIMS.” To learn more about the brand and offerings, you can visit hims.com/about and hims.com/how-it-works . For information on the company’s outstanding benefits, culture, and its talent-first flexible/remote work approach, see below and visit www.hims.com/careers-professionals.

About the Role

AI is disrupting our stack from the inside, and we’re looking for a Principal Engineer to architect that transformation from day one. Applied AI is a small, fast-moving team building a fresh take on how patient care should happen, from intake through ongoing care companionship. While much of the team is focused on research and rapid experimentation, this role is the productionization counterpart — the person who takes what’s working and makes it robust, scalable, and reliable enough to run in production at the core of the patient experience.

You’ll be the key architect of the patient-facing experience end-to-end, owning how the services across the stack fit together. This is a hands-on role for someone who thinks about robustness, scalability, and debuggability from day one, and who can balance building for today with architecting for where the product needs to go over the next several years.

Key Responsibilities

  • Own Service Architecture

    Own the overall architecture for the Applied AI stack — how individual services blend together into a coherent, end-to-end patient-facing experience, from intake through ongoing companion interactions.

  • Productionize AI-Driven Experiences

    Partner with research-focused teammates who move fast on experimentation, and take their work to production: hardening services for uptime, reliability, and scale. Bring engineering rigor to a team that’s optimized for speed of iteration.

  • Reliability & Operational Excellence

    Instill best practices around debugging, observability, and operational readiness. Design for robustness and scalability from day one rather than retrofitting it later.

  • Mentorship & Talent Growth
    Mentor senior technical leaders, elevating engineering capabilities across the organization. Champion initiatives that foster talent density, engineering rigor, and a culture of continuous learning

  • Ambiguity Navigation & Execution Acceleration
    Lead through complexity and ambiguity, clarifying direction where ownership is unclear. Remove organizational blockers, simplify decision-making, and accelerate delivery of strategic initiatives

  • Customer-Centric Engineering
    Translate customer needs and product goals into scalable technical solutions. Define principles and patterns that embed customer obsession into our platform’s architecture

  • Sustainability & Scalability
    Design systems and team boundaries to support sustainable growth. Drive investment in non-functional priorities (e.g., observability, migrations, reliability) early in the design process

What You Bring

  • 15+ years of professional software engineering experience with deep architectural expertise and a record of delivering production systems at scale.

  • Proven track record of influencing technical strategy and delivering cross-org technical initiatives at the group or organizational level.

  • Excellent track record standing up services at scale in production, with a demonstrated ability to think about robustness, scalability, and debuggability from day one.

  • Deep experience owning service architecture across a full stack — understanding how services should blend together, not just how to build any one of them well.

  • A “productionization” mindset: comfortable being the counterweight to a fast-moving research/experimentation culture, focused on uptime and reliability.

  • Hands-on engineering ability; you want to stay close to the code and the architecture, not just the roadmap.

  • Some exposure to LLM/AI services — you don’t need deep AI expertise, but you should have tested the waters with LLM or AI-powered systems in some capacity.

  • Ability to think long-term and build for the future, balancing near-term delivery with durable architecture.

  • Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to partner across research, product, and clinical stakeholders.

You’ll Thrive Here If You:

  • Create alignment and momentum in ambiguous or complex technical spaces.

  • Balance short-term deliverables with long-term scalability, system health, and customer experience.

  • Lead with curiosity, adaptability, and principled decision-making.

  • Take initiative to address cross-squad blockers, scale constraints, or misaligned priorities before they escalate.

  • Drive consistent, action-oriented execution even without perfect clarity.

  • Mentor senior engineering talent and reinforce a culture of growth, feedback, and high technical standards.

  • Inspire confidence through transparency, humility, and deep technical credibility.

  • Advocate for customers through scalable, resilient backend design that anticipates clinical complexity and future scale.

  • Want to help architect how AI reshapes a company’s stack and product, from the inside, from day one.

We are committed to building a workforce that reflects diverse perspectives and prioritizes ethics, wellness, and a strong sense of belonging. If you’re excited about this role, we encourage you to apply—even if you’re not sure if your background or experience is a perfect match.

Hims considers all qualified applicants for employment, including applicants with arrest or conviction records, in accordance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, the California Fair Chance Act, and any similar state or local fair chance laws.

It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.

Hims & Hers is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, please contact us at accommodations@forhims.com and describe the needed accommodation. Your privacy is important to us, and any information you share will only be used for the legitimate purpose of considering your request for accommodation. Hims & Hers gives consideration to all qualified applicants without regard to any protected status, including disability. Please do not send resumes to this email address.

To learn more about how we collect, use, retain, and disclose Personal Information, please visit our Global Candidate Privacy Statement.

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