AI Research Engineer

About the role

MISSION

The Path https://www.thepath.ai/ is a research lab and consumer health company on a mission to provide therapy-grade help and coaching for anyone, anytime.

Over 3 billion people a year have a problem large enough to warrant therapy but the barriers to access - around price, time, geography, stigma, and language - are so large that less than 10% of these people are getting the help they need.

The Path exists because help shouldn’t depend on privilege, because intelligence should serve humanity, and because clarity is the first act of care.

Our purpose-built AI therapists provide evidence-based mental health support delivered through artificial intelligence, designed to get smarter with every session. The Path was built by a neuroscientist who understands how the brain actually changes. Most AI chat tools were not.

Every role here moves that work forward. Join a small, passionate in-person team in San Francisco building the AI and the clinical research behind it!

THE OPPORTUNITY

Design, train, ship, iterate on, and innovate on the AI brains behind The Path’s AI Therapist. Combine research, data science, and engineering to create models, orchestration, and evaluation systems that make therapy conversations deeply effective, clinically grounded, and safe.

Note - Below contains the outcomes and competencies for the team. If you bring standout strengths in some areas but not all, you are still encouraged to apply.

RESPONSIBILITIES

- Improve quality of AI Therapy: Deliver measurable improvements in conversation quality, therapeutic alliance, and user outcomes through fine-tuning strategies, training data curation, building RL environments, new model architectures and other AI innovations.

- Improve evaluation of AI quality: Improve on and maintain a robust eval stack that includes scripted tests, LLM-as-judge evaluations, human ratings, and safety checks. Improve automated regression testing, detection of defects, and observability (eg dashboards).

- Own AI system. Build, maintain, and iterate on the production codebase that delivers AI therapy and supports the evaluation and iteration of our AI.

- Productionize Models and Pipelines. Own The Path from notebook to production: training jobs, model packaging, deployment, monitoring, and rollback strategies. Keep latency, reliability, and cost within agreed budgets while enabling rapid iteration on new ideas.

- Safety, Alignment, and Clinical Guardrails Work with clinicians and internal experts to encode clinical guidelines into prompts, reward functions, tools, and filters. Proactively identify and reduce harmful or low-quality behaviors through targeted experiments, red teaming, and mitigations.

- Own Research Roadmap and Experiment Velocity Run high-quality experiments from hypothesis to analysis to improve our understanding of what matters and what works. Shape and execute a focused R&D roadmap.