Senior Engineer

Work Flexibility: Hybrid or Onsite Vocera, now part of Stryker, is looking for a highly skilled and hands-on Senior Engineer – AI/ML to join our AI platform and speech applications team. In this role, you will design, build, and scale AI-driven solutions that power real-time speech, voice, and GenAI capabilities across Stryker’s clinical communication platforms. This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who has a strong understanding of modern AI/ML models, is fluent in Python, and has deep experience building and operationalizing AI systems on Microsoft Azure. **What You Will Do** **Core Responsibilities** * Design, develop, and deploy AI/ML-powered applications with a focus on speech, language, and GenAI use cases. * Integrate and operationalize speech-to-text, text-to-speech, NLP, and LLM-based models into production-grade backend services. * Build and maintain cloud-native AI pipelines on Azure, including model deployment, scaling, monitoring, and cost optimization. * Develop AI-driven features such as: * Voice transcription and real-time speech processing * Intent detection and entity extraction * Conversational AI and virtual assistants * Summarization, semantic search, and RAG-based workflows * Fine-tune and adapt models for domain-specific vocabulary, accents, noisy environments, and healthcare contexts. * Collaborate closely with backend engineers, product owners, UX teams, and platform teams to deliver end-to-end AI features. * Make independent architecture and design trade-off decisions across multiple components and services. * Drive engineering best practices around testing, reliability, observability, and security for AI systems. * Contribute to technical documentation, design reviews, and architecture discussions. * Participate in customer-facing discussions (Voice of Customer) to align AI solutions with real-world usage and feedback. * Actively contribute to innovation through patents, invention disclosures, or internal IP creation. * Mentor junior engineers and raise the overall AI/ML engineering maturity of the team. **Required Qualifications** * Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field. * 3-10 years of experience in software engineering with significant hands-on work in AI/ML systems. * Strong proficiency in Python, with experience building production-grade ML or AI services. * Solid understanding of machine learning, NLP, and modern AI model architectures, including LLMs. * Experience deploying and operating AI workloads on Microsoft Azure. * Strong engineering fundamentals: system design, APIs, data pipelines, scalability, and reliability. **Preferred / Strongly Desired Qualifications AI / ML & GenAI** * Hands-on experience with LLMs, NLP pipelines, RAG architectures, prompt engineering, and model evaluation. * Experience integrating or fine-tuning speech models (ASR/TTS) for real-world applications. * Familiarity with frameworks and tools such as Azure OpenAI, Azure ML, LangChain, MLflow, PyTorch, and TensorFlow. * Exposure to sentiment analysis, intent recognition, semantic search, or conversational AI. **Cloud & Platform** * Strong experience with Azure services, such as: * Azure OpenAI * Azure ML * Azure Functions / Container Apps * Azure AI Search * Storage, monitoring, and security services * Experience designing cloud-native, scalable, and secure architectures. * Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and ML lifecycle management. * Exposure to AWS or GCP is a plus. Engineering & Collaboration * Experience integrating third-party APIs and AI services. * Background in Java-based backend systems is a plus. * Strong documentation, design review, and cross-team collaboration skills. * Comfortable working in an Agile development environment. Travel Percentage: 10%