Director, AI Product Development
OverviewHeadquarters: Remote - USCentralReach is a leading provider of autism and IDD care software for Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), multidisciplinary therapy, and special education. Trusted by more than 200,000 users, we enable therapy providers, educators, and employers to scale the way they deliver ABA and related therapies with innovative technology and customer satisfaction.CentralReach's AI team operates as an AI Foundry: a cross-functional group that rapidly builds, validates, and scales AI-enabled product capabilities. The Principal Software Engineer, AI Applications is the senior-most engineer on the AI team and sets the technical bar for how AI-powered product experiences are designed, built, evaluated, and operated.This role is hands-on and deeply engaged across the early stages of development of AI applications, from early prototypes and pilots through production hardening and scale. They partner closely with AI product builders, Product organization leaders, and DevOps to translate customer problems into reliable AI features that integrate with CentralReach's core workflows. They also establish engineering standards for AI application development: evaluation and quality thresholds, observability, guardrails and performance management.Key AccountabilitiesLead AI application development within the AI Foundry, setting standards for code quality, architecture, and deliveryDesign and implement core AI application components, critical services, and integration layersMentor AI engineers; raise the bar on engineering rigor and AI-specific best practicesEstablish quality thresholds and release criteria (accuracy, latency, reliability, cost, and user trust)Design safeguards and safe failure modes: fallback behaviors, confidence thresholds, user controls, content filtering, and transparency patternsAI Application Development (Hands-On)Build AI-powered product capabilities end-to-end (service + workflow integration + instrumentation), including LLM-enabled workflows, RAG, summarization, classification, and automation patternsBuild and maintain shared libraries/components for AI application development (prompt/tooling patterns, service templates, evaluation utilities, safety layers)Own technical readiness for production: reliability, observability, performance tuning, and incident response preparednessCollaborate with Platform Engineering and DevOps to ensure CI/CD and environment consistency, scaling strategies, cost controls for inference, and secrets management and secure data handlingCross-Functional Delivery & IntegrationPartner with AI product builders and workflow Product owners to translate validated prototypes into production implementationsCollaborate with core engineering teams to integrate AI capabilities into CentralReach's main platformsStrategic Direction & InnovationIdentify and prioritize foundational investments that increase delivery velocity and reduce long-term maintenance: reusable components, platform primitives, and standardized patternsEvaluate build vs. buy decisions for AI tooling and recommend approaches aligned to CR constraintsStay current with AI application engineering practices and translate emerging techniques into safe, valuable product capabilitiesDesired Skills and ExperienceBachelor\'s degree or equivalent work experience10+ years of professional software engineering experience with principal-level scope and demonstrated technical leadershipStrong experience building and operating production distributed systems and backend servicesHands-on experience delivering AI/ML-powered product features (LLMs and/or traditional ML), including evaluation and monitoringExperience with retrieval systems and search relevance (RAG, embeddings, indexing, ranking, evaluation)Strong system design skills: APIs, data flows, integration patterns, performance and reliability tradeoffsExperience with observability and operational excellence (logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, incident response)Ability to communicate technical concepts clearly to product, design, and executive stakeholdersExperience in a healthcare SaaS environmentFamiliarity with multi-tenant architectures and enterprise access control modelsExperience building internal platforms/tooling that improve developer experience and standardize best practicesLI-RemoteCompensationBase Salary Range: $180,000 - $200,000 USDJ-18808-Ljbffr