Senior Engineer

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.

Core Responsibilities

What You Will Do

• 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.
  
  

Stryker is a global leader in medical technologies and, together with its customers, is driven to make healthcare better. The company offers innovative products and services in MedSurg, Neurotechnology, Orthopaedics and Spine that help improve patient and healthcare outcomes. Alongside its customers around the world, Stryker impacts more than 150 million patients annually.