---
title: 'AI Research Engineer at The Path'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/ai-research-engineer-the-path-san-francisco-d9dvyy2yct7k'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-09'
---

# AI Research Engineer at The Path

- **Company:** The Path
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2025-12-02
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/pathos/fbec38e7-d55b-4bb3-8c74-644d75626c82

## Job description

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.

## MISSION

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.

## OUTCOMES

1. 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.
2. 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).
3. Own AI system. Build, maintain, and iterate on the production codebase that delivers AI therapy and supports the evaluation and iteration of our AI.
4. 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.
5. Improve 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.
6. 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.
7. Collaboration with Clinicians, Product, and Engineering. Translate product and clinical requirements into concrete model and system changes. Partner with full-stack product engineers so that new AI capabilities are easy to integrate and maintain in the product.

## COMPETENCIES

1. LLM and Applied ML Depth. Demonstrates strong experience with large language models, including fine-tuning, training data design, and model selection. Knows how to move core metrics on conversation quality and user outcomes, rather than chasing generic benchmarks. Can look at evals, transcripts, and metrics and quickly form grounded hypotheses for improvement.
2. Ships clean, maintainable, quality code. No only do you know how transformers work, but you are also an engineer that has experience shipping production-level code and/or maintaining an AI system in production.
3. Data Engineering Skills. Can set up production-level data pipelines for training new models, evals, analysis, etc.
4. Scientific Mindset. You formulate hypotheses, and you are good at evaluating them (eg through experiments, data analysis, etc). You are consistently learning at the cutting edge, and you’re able to leverage and communicate those learnings to make the entire company more successful.
5. Ruthless Prioritizer. You are keenly aware of how to provide company value and to prioritize projects accordingly. Resistant to nerd-sniping https://xkcd.com/356/.
6. Quality Obsessive: Refuses to ship subpar work, continuously improving the codebase.
7. Fast: Prioritizes speed by leveraging AI, breaking down complex tasks, shipping early, optimizing for learnings, iterating quickly, and avoiding over-engineering.
8. Strong communicator. You can work collaboratively in a positive way. Sees others perspectives. Strong opinions, loosely held. Focused on user/business value, not ego.

## GREAT TO HAVE

- Personal or other experience with therapy or coaching
- Domain knowledge of psychology, neuroscience, therapy, or coaching.

## About The Path

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: The Path is an AI therapy and coaching app built by a neuroscientist and psychologist, co-founded with Tony Robbins, that delivers challenge-based mental health support personalized to each user.
- **Entity Type**: Private (product launched April 2026)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Founders**: Dr. Anson Whitmer (CEO & Co-Founder), Tony Robbins (Co-Founder), Tyler Sheaffer (CTO & Co-Founder)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Digital mental health / AI therapy
- **Target customers**: B2C – individuals seeking therapy, coaching, and personal growth
- **Mission**: To build the world’s most effective AI therapist by combining neuroscience research with proven coaching frameworks, moving users forward instead of keeping them engaged on the app.

## Products & Services
- **The Path App (Consumer)**: An AI-powered therapy and coaching platform available in 50 languages. Offers 11 distinct AI therapist personalities with different styles (e.g., direct, warm, results-focused). Uses proprietary AI built on Dr. Whitmer’s research on attentional scope and rumination, and Tony Robbins’ State → Story → Strategy and 6 Human Needs frameworks. Includes proactive check-ins, session-length limits, daily challenges, and a rich personal profile that adapts over time.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metrics**: 50K+ active members, 2.5M+ sessions completed, 2,700+ reviews with a 4.9★ App Store rating, 42× more compute per session than general use AI.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Co-founded with Tony Robbins. Clinical oversight by Medical Director Dr. Dean Ornish, M.D. (Clinical Professor of Medicine at UCSF). The team includes PhDs in psychology, neuroscience, and machine learning.
- **Growth Signals**: Rapid adoption since April 2026 launch; 2.5M sessions completed; expanding AI therapist personalities (including a Tony Robbins AI in development); 4.9★ rating with high user retention.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Unique founding team**: A neuroscientist CEO with 2,600+ research citations in rumination and executive control, combined with Tony Robbins’ 45 years of coaching methodology.
- **Challenge-based design**: The Path intentionally breaks the engagement-loop pattern common in wellness apps by limiting session length and proactively challenging users, based on peer-reviewed research.
- **Individual-level personalization**: Builds a model of each user rather than applying population-level averages, leading to compounding insight over time.
- **Clinical credibility**: Overseen by Dr. Dean Ornish, whose lifestyle-medicine research is reimbursed by Medicare, and a team of licensed clinicians.

## Strategic Focus
- Scaling the platform to serve millions, with a continued emphasis on personalization and outcome measurement.
- Launching a Tony Robbins-specific AI therapist for relationship and career coaching.
- Deepening clinical validation and integrating evidence-based protocols (CBT, ACT, solution-focused therapy, motivational interviewing).

## Why Work Here
- **Team & culture**: “Small, in-person-first team in San Francisco” – a highly collaborative, mission-driven environment where every role (engineering, clinical, design, operations) directly shapes mental health access.
- **Engineering & AI**: Build the proprietary AI engine from the ground up, working at the intersection of neuroscience, machine learning, and clinical research.
- **Values**: Emphasis on “exceptional ability” and mission alignment; the company prioritizes real outcomes over vanity metrics.
- **Perks**: Likely includes meaningful equity in a fast-growing startup, direct exposure to world-class research and coaching frameworks, and the chance to define the next era of therapy.

## Sources
1. [thepath.ai](https://www.thepath.ai/)
2. [thepath.ai/careers](https://www.thepath.ai/careers/)
3. [thepath.ai/about](https://www.thepath.ai/about/)
4. [thepath.ai/about/our-team](https://www.thepath.ai/about/our-team/)
5. [Ashby Jobs – AI Research Engineer](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/pathos/fbec38e7-d55b-4bb3-8c74-644d75626c82)

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