Staff Applied Scientist

Opportunity Overview:

As a Staff Applied Scientist, you will play a critical technical leadership role on Cohere Health’s AS team, with a primary focus on powering and scaling machine learning capabilities across our products.

You will apply state-of-the-art machine learning, large language models, and agentic architectures to complex clinical and operational intake workflows, helping automate decision-making, improve data quality, and reduce administrative burden for clinical teams. In this role, you will partner closely with clinical operations, product, and engineering teams to uncover hidden drivers, inform strategic decisions, and design and evaluate ML systems that directly impact how members and providers experience Cohere Health at the front door of care.

This role blends deep hands-on technical work with strategic influence, mentorship, and ownership across multiple work streams, while contributing to broader ML initiatives.

What you’ll do:

• Design, develop and evaluate advanced machine learning systems for retrieval, classification, prediction, and generative use cases.
• Apply advanced statistical and ML techniques to extract insights from large-scale structured and unstructured healthcare datasets.
• Lead model development across the ML lifecycle, including experimentation, training, evaluation, partnering with AI engineering to support deployment, monitoring, and iteration.
• Write and maintain reusable codebases to perform data preprocessing, model training, evaluation, and deployment
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, clinicians, data engineers, BI engineers, and design teams to translate business and clinical needs into robust ML solutions.
• Drive experimentation by defining problem statements, forming falsifiable hypotheses, and designing rigorous evaluation frameworks tied to business outcomes.
• Review, communicate, and present ML insights and results to technical and non-technical stakeholders, including executive leadership.
• Serve as a technical mentor and advisor to junior engineers, providing guidance on ML best practices, experimentation, and system design.
• Contribute as an expert advisor across multiple initiatives, helping shape ML strategy and performance tracking across the organization.

What you’ll need:

Must-haves

• Master’s degree (PhD preferred) in Computer Science, Data Science, Machine Learning, or a closely related quantitative field.
• 7+ years of professional experience in applied machine learning or data science, including ownership of production ML systems.
• Deep expertise in Python and modern deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch).
• Hands-on experience building and evaluating deep learning models (e.g., transformers) for NLP tasks.
• Strong understanding of experimental design, model evaluation, and optimization for real-world production environments.
• Experience leveraging cloud platforms (AWS preferred) across the ML lifecycle (training, deployment, monitoring).
• Proven ability to collaborate with product, business, and clinical partners to drive data-informed decision-making.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with experience presenting to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with generative AI, large language models, agentic systems, or Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).
• Experience driving automation in healthcare or regulated environments.
• Familiarity with healthcare workflows such as claims, coding, utilization management, or network operations.
• Experience working with unstructured healthcare data (e.g., clinical notes, OCR, document understanding).
• Hands-on e