Senior Principal Machine Learning Engineer
Cotiviti
$250,000–$280,000from the description
Jul 5, 2026
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Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior individual-contributor role focused on architecting and delivering large-scale ML and LLM-powered systems over healthcare claims, clinical records, and member data. Core work spans building evaluation frameworks, driving labeled-data flywheels through clinician feedback, designing ranking and prioritization systems, and establishing reusable platform infrastructure. The role suits a deeply experienced ML engineer comfortable setting technical direction, mentoring senior peers, and operating across engineering, product, and clinical stakeholders in a regulated, high-stakes domain.
Principal level · 12+ years · Remote · Doctorate required · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 220 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (data scientists). range 90–320
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $122,874 (middle half $87,544–$162,374). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (10)
The title 'Senior Principal Machine Learning Engineer' maps to Principal seniority: the JD explicitly describes org-wide technical authority, executive-level AI/ML strategy influence, company-wide standards-setting, and cross-team scope — genuine Principal-level signals beyond a typical Senior.
The role is fully remote; no primary metro is specified. CBSA fields are left blank accordingly.
SOC code 15-2051 (Data Scientists) is chosen because the core work is ML modeling, evaluation frameworks, experimentation, and statistical rigor. However, the heavy production-engineering emphasis (pipelines, platform patterns, distributed systems) makes 15-1252 (Software Developers) a credible runner-up.
A PhD in a quantitative discipline is listed as a hard requirement under 'Required' qualifications — the degree requirement is set to Doctorate.
Presto and Trino are listed together as interchangeable SQL-at-scale engines; they are captured as one skill with Trino as an alternative.
The 'Highly valued' section is treated as preferred (not required), covering LLM-as-a-Judge pipelines, supervised fine-tuning, healthcare data experience, HIPAA familiarity, and prompt engineering.
Causal inference and A/B testing are listed under the Required qualifications block ('Strong experimentation discipline: A/B testing, causal inference…') and are therefore treated as hard gates despite being methodologies rather than named tools — they are concrete, named analytical techniques the JD explicitly gates on.
The posting includes '#director' as a hashtag, but the role is framed as an individual-contributor Principal engineer with no direct-report or budget-ownership language; 11-3021 (Computer and Information Systems Managers) was not selected.
Ignored 1 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): LLM-as-a-Judge.
This posting reads as a fully-remote role, so it was scored against the national candidate pool rather than a single metro.
Read the full posting
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