LLM Engineer

SHIFT:

Seeking Breakthrough Makers

Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) offers countless ways to change lives. Our diverse community of more than 20,000 Breakthrough Makers will inspire you to pursue passions, develop expertise, and drive innovation.

At CHOP, your experience is valued; your voice is heard; and your contributions make a difference for patients and families. Join us as we build on our promise to advance pediatric care-and your career.

CHOP does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin, religion, or any other legally protected categories in any employment, training, or vendor decisions or programs. CHOP recognizes the critical importance of a workforce rich in varied backgrounds and experiences and engages in ongoing efforts to achieve that through equally varied and non-discriminatory means.

A Brief Overview
This role is designed for a technically strong, implementation-oriented data scientist who will help build and deploy large language model (LLM) and related AI solutions for real clinical and operational use cases in pathology and laboratory medicine. This position will focus on building and evaluating safe, scalable AI tools for healthcare environments, including workflow design, document understanding, model evaluation, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), prompt engineering within larger system architectures, and reinforcement learning or iterative feedback-driven refinement. Representative projects may include laboratory question-answering tools, methods to improve the clarity and standardization of laboratory test names and reduce confusion in clinical ordering, tools to make complex pathology reports more understandable to patient families, and selected quality-support applications. The role will work closely with clinical faculty, laboratory leaders, informaticians, software developers, and hospital digital transformation partners so that what is built is not only useful within the department, but also governed, interoperable, and capable of broader enterprise scale. The ideal candidate will be excited by translating modern AI capabilities into robust, scalable, real-world products in healthcare. This position is likely to be most attractive to candidates who enjoy hands-on development, evaluation, and implementation of production-oriented AI systems in operational settings, including close collaboration with clinicians, informaticians, and software engineers.

What you will do

• Implement computational algorithms and experiments for test and evaluation; interprets data to assess algorithm performance.
• Develop high-quality code implementing models and algorithms as application programming interfaces or other service-oriented software implementations.
• Participate in communication of research methods, implementation, and results to varied audience of clinicians, scientists, analysts, and programmers.
• Work closely with applications research group to translate models and algorithms into engineered production applications.
• Contribute to manuscript writing for results publication, authors abstracts, and presents at professional conferences.

Education Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree Required
• Bachelor's Degree in analytics, computer/data science, statistics, mathematics or related field Preferred

Experience Qualifications

• At least one (1) year of applied algorithm development, data science, applied statistics, machine learning, or mathematical modeling projects experience Preferred

Preferred Experience

• Basic proficiency with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Reinforcement Learning (RL)
• Basic proficiency with Cloud machine learning platforms, such as Azure AI Studio / Azure OpenAI / Microsoft Foundry, AWS Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, OpenAI API, Anthropic, Databricks, Snowflake Cortex, Hugging Face, etc.
• Basic proficiency with developing and implementing AI agents
• Basic proficiency with validation, monitoring, safety (identifying and addressing vulnerabilities, biases, and edge cases before deployment)
• Fundamental knowledge of orchestration frameworks and/or multi-agentic work

Skills and Abilities

• Basic proficiency with formulating analysis plans, selecting appropriate methods, and implementing data analysis and machine learning pipelines
• Basic proficiency with programing languages (Python, R, Java, TypeScript, C/C++, C#, etc)
• Basic proficiency with writing code in applied academic or professional projects
• Basic proficiency with creating informative visualizations for complex, high dimensional data
• Basic proficiency with machine learning models, both classical machine learning (generalized linear models, non-linear models, tree-based methods, etc) as well as deep learning
• Fundamental knowledge of relational databases (Postgres, MySQL)
• Fundamental knowledge of web services application programming interfaces
• Strong verbal and written communications skills
• Ability to maintain confidentiality and professionalism
• Ability to work independently with minimal supervision
• Ability to gather, analyze and make recommendations/decisions based on data / best practices

To carry out its mission, CHOP is committed to supporting the health of our patients, families, workforce, and global community. As a condition of employment, CHOP employees who work in patient care buildings or who have patient facing responsibilities must receive an annual influenza vaccine. Learn more.

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SALARY RANGE:

Salary ranges are shown for full-time jobs. If you're working part-time, your pay will be adjusted accordingly.

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At CHOP, we are committed to fair and transparent pay practices. Factors such as skills and experience could result in an offer above the salary range noted in this job posting. Click here for more information regarding CHOP's Compensation and Benefits.