Founding Engineer - Applied Research

Founding Engineer, Applied Research | Bay Area (On-site) | $160K–$200K + Equity

Want your research to actually ship, and to fix one of the most broken corners of US healthcare?

We're partnering with a well-funded, seed-stage healthcare AI startup building intelligent infrastructure for healthcare payments. Their platform reads clinical documentation, understands medical context and makes defensible determinations on charts, claims, prior authorizations, denials and payer policies. The product is live with providers, processes thousands of charts a day, and customer demand is outpacing the team.

It's a team of six, so as a founding engineer you'll shape the core intelligence of the product from day one.

What you'll do:

• Build clinical evals to measure and improve model performance across chart understanding, claims review, authorization logic and denial analysis
• Improve core model intelligence through prompting, fine-tuning, retrieval and structured reasoning on real clinical and financial data
• Build agentic browser-use and computer-use models that navigate payer portals, EHRs and complex healthcare software
• Turn feedback from live provider and payer workflows into bounded research problems, then ship solutions to production
• Partner with backend and forward-deployed engineers to productionize research at high velocity

What we're looking for:

• 3+ years in ML research, evals, language models or applied AI systems using Python
• Hands-on experience with fine-tuning, evals, agentic systems or computer-use models
• Someone who can take ambiguous problems, scope them and deliver measurable real-world impact
• Healthcare experience is a bonus, not a requirement

The details:

• $160K–$200K base plus 0.20%–0.50% equity, and they'll go above band for exceptional candidates
• On-site in the Bay Area, 5 days a week
• Open to US citizens and green card holders only (no visa sponsorship)

If you want to apply cutting-edge AI to a problem with enormous real-world stakes, let's talk. DM me or drop a comment, and I'll share the full details confidentially.

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