Job Description

At St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, technology serves a higher purpose: advancing cures and saving lives. We are seeking a Software Developer II with experience in AI to support our Research IT ecosystem by building intelligent, reliable, and scalable AI solutions that directly enable scientific discovery in pediatric catastrophic diseases.

In this role, you will design and implement software solutions, including AI and large language model (LLM)–powered systems, that help researchers make sense of complex data, accelerate insights, and improve how research tools are delivered and sustained.

Your work will bridge cutting-edge AI innovation and dependable production systems, ensuring that models are performant, cost-effective, interpretable, and maintainable in a research healthcare environment.

You will collaborate closely with engineers, data scientists, and research teams to build data pipelines, APIs, and microservices that bring AI models from experimentation into daily use—supporting everything from knowledge discovery to decision support. Beyond deployment, you will help steward these models over time through monitoring, drift detection, and continuous improvement, recognizing that reliability and trust are critical when supporting life-changing research.

This role is ideal for someone driven by impact—who wants to apply modern software engineering and AI techniques such as LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and vector databases in service of a mission larger than any single product. At St. Jude, your work contributes not only to technical excellence, but to a global commitment: ensuring families never receive a bill for treatment, travel, housing, or food—so they can focus on helping their child lives.

Job Responsibilities:

• Design and implement AI solutions (e.g., recommendation systems, NLP pipelines, LLM-powered features).

• Build and maintain data pipelines for training, evaluation, and inference.

• Integrate AI models into production systems via APIs and microservices.

• Work with large language models (LLMs), including prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and evaluation.

• Optimize model performance, latency, and cost in production environments.

• Collaborate with engineering teams to ensure clean architecture and maintainable code.

• Monitor and improve deployed models (drift detection, retraining, logging).

• Stay current with advancements in AI and assess their practical application.

• Contribute to defined system scope and objectives for assigned projects combining knowledge and disciplines of all aspects (e.g. program stack, memory management, networking utilization).

• Assist all levels of software developers in developing software to support object oriented software applications.

• Actively support and participate in the software development lifecycle management process (e.g. software coding, testing, debugging, documenting, installation).

• Assist in developing detailed specifications from which programs will be written for group level systems.

• Work with customers, vendors, and/or departments on technical issues including software system design and maintenance.

• Ensure the rigorous application of information security/information assurance policies, principles, and practices.

• Remain current and actively contribute in the evaluation and adaption of new methods and technologies.

• Perform other duties as assigned to meet the goals and objectives of the department and institution.

• Maintains regular and predictable attendance.

Minimum Education and/or Training:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, data science, information science, business, or related field required.

• Master's degree preferred.

Minimum Experience:

• Minimum experience: 2+years of IT experience in systems programming and development preferably in comparable industry.

• Familiarity with SDLC methodologies (e.g. Agile, Waterfall, CI/CD).

• Some experience working with business stakeholders to identify and document Requirements.

• Proven performance in earlier role/comparable role.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, open-source models) and vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS).

• Knowledge of RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) architectures and background in NLP, recommendation systems, or deep learning.

Compensation

In recognition of certain U.S. state and municipal pay transparency laws, St. Jude is including a reasonable estimate of the compensation range for this role. This is an estimate offered in good faith and a specific salary offer takes into account factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to skill sets, experience and training, licensure and certifications, and other business and organizational needs. It is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the salary range and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current salary range is $78,000 - $139,360 per year for the role of Software Developer II.

Explore our exceptional benefits!

St. Jude is an Equal Opportunity Employer

No Search Firms

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital does not accept unsolicited assistance from search firms for employment opportunities. Please do not call or email. All resumes submitted by search firms to any employee or other representative at St. Jude via email, the internet or in any form and/or method without a valid written search agreement in place and approved by HR will result in no fee being paid in the event the candidate is hired by St. Jude.