Senior AI Engineer, Talkspace
$169-200k
Online therapy platform
Be an early applicant
Online therapy platform
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$169-200k
1001+ employees
Company mission
To make therapy and psychiatry more available and affordable.
Role
Who you are
- This role requires deep expertise in developing complex, multi-agent systems, leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for reasoning, planning, and goal setting, and applying Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques to model and influence human behavior safely and ethically
- The ideal candidate is a seasoned engineer who can bridge the gap between theoretical AI (specifically RL and planning) and real-world, scalable, and impactful user interactions
- To work at Talkspace, you need to be as passionate as we are about our work, and excited to partner with us on delivering quality mental healthcare
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a highly quantitative field
- Minimum of 5+ years of experience in a production software engineering environment, with at least 3+ years specifically focused on designing, implementing, and deploying complex machine learning or autonomous systems
- Exceptional Python Programming Skills: Mastery of Python and its scientific libraries
- Production MLOps Expertise: Demonstrated experience building and managing CI/CD pipelines for ML models and integrating them into service-oriented architectures (SOA)
- Autonomous/Agentic Systems: Strong theoretical understanding and practical application of techniques central to agentic AI, such as Reinforcement Learning (RL), planning algorithms, or complex decision-making systems
- LLM Deployment: Hands-on experience fine-tuning, deploying, and managing Large Language Models (LLMs) in a production environment, including knowledge of prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and cost optimization
- Software Engineering Rigor: Proven ability to write high-quality, maintainable, scalable, and well-tested production code
- Proficiency with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP) and containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes)
What the job involves
- We are looking for an experienced Senior AI Engineer to join our team
- The Senior AI Engineer will be a pivotal technical leader, responsible for designing, building, and scaling the autonomous AI agents that form the core of our behavioral health platform
- You will drive the entire lifecycle of our agents—from developing cognitive architectures and interaction models to ensuring their robust, high-availability deployment and continuous learning in a production environment
- Given the sensitivity of behavioral health, this role demands an exceptional focus on safety, ethical autonomy, transparency, and data privacy
- Autonomous System Architecture: Design and implement the technical architecture for Sentia’s core AI agents, including the development of planning modules, memory/retrieval systems, goal-setting algorithms, and tool-use orchestration
- Reinforcement Learning (RL) for Behavior: Apply advanced RL, Inverse RL, or related control theory methods to develop agents capable of adaptive, long-term intervention strategies that maximize positive user outcomes while minimizing risk (e.g., optimizing interaction sequencing, timing, and content)
- LLM Integration and Fine-tuning: Select, fine-tune, and deploy foundation models (LLMs) to power agent reasoning, natural language understanding, and empathetic, context-aware communication with users
- Complex Interaction Modeling: Develop models for human-agent interaction (HAI), incorporating principles from cognitive science and behavioral economics to ensure agents are effective, trustworthy, and aligned with therapeutic protocols
- Simulated Environments: Construct robust simulation environments for pre-training and testing agent policies, ensuring system stability and safety across a wide range of psychological and behavioral scenarios
- Performance and Resilience: Optimize the deployment environment to manage the computational demands of multi-agent orchestration, ensuring low-latency decision-making and high system resilience
- Technical Strategy: Lead the evaluation and adoption of new agentic frameworks, reasoning technologies, and system design patterns that position Sentia as a leader in autonomous behavioral health technology
- Agent Evaluation & Observability: Design and implement comprehensive evaluation pipelines for multi-agent orchestration—including visualisations, trace-level analysis of LLM calls and tool invocations, offline evaluation against golden datasets, real-time production monitoring for behavioral drift and outcome correlation, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop annotation workflows. Establish metrics frameworks to assess reasoning quality, task completion, safety compliance, and task alignment across the full agent lifecycle
Our take
Founded in 2012, Talkspace is one of the established names in the online therapy space, offering a unique, appointment-free approach to mental health support. By providing unlimited access to a network of healthcare professionals, the platform delivers a cost-effective solution to underserved individuals in need of therapy, making mental health services more accessible than ever.
As venture capital interest in digital behavioral health continues to rise, Talkspace faces increasing competition from startups like BetterHealth and Calmerry. However, its 2021 public offering and acquisition of relationship counselling platform Lasting have solidified its position as a leader in the telehealth space.
The company isn't slowing down though. As it continues to innovate, with the launch of Talkspace Engage - a portal designed to help HR teams foster workplace mental wellbeing and increase the use of available mental health resources. More recently, Talkspace expanded its reach to 9.5M military personnel and their families, further solidifying its commitment to making mental hearth care accessible to all.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
12% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 10 rounds)
Nov 2021
$3m
GRANT
Jan 2021
$2.1m
GRANT
Total funding: $115m
Company benefits
- Health: You’ll get comprehensive medical, dental and vision plan coverage from day one
- Retirement: You’ll receive a 401k retirement savings program with company-matching
- Equity: You’ll also receive equity as part of your package
- Wellness: Enjoy a monthly wellness stipend for your own wellbeing
- Flexible time off: You'll have access to flexible PTO
- Mental health: You’ll receive access to all Talkspace products, including therapy and psychiatry
Company HQ
Murray Hill, New York, NY
Leadership
Jon Cohen, M.D.
(CEO)They joined Talkspace in 2022 as CEO. Prior to this, they were they Executive Chairman/CEO at BioReference Laboratories, SVP and Chief Medical Officer at Quest Diagnostics, Senior Advisor to Gov. David Patterson at the New York State Executive Chamber and Chief Medical Officer at Northwell Health.
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