Founding AI Engineer, Clinical Research

Backbone; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Backbone, building the clinical AI layer for healthcare payments, is seeking a Founding Engineer, Applied Research in San Francisco. You’ll tackle applied research problems that power real-world decision making in claims, denials, and payer policies, translating research into production features.

Work spans model improvements, evals, and engineering collaboration to read charts and clinical data, with impact across workflows and budgets.

Qualifications

• Experience in ML research, language models, NLP, evals, reinforcement learning, or agentic systems.

Responsibilities

• Build evals for clinical reasoning, chart understanding, claims review, authorization logic, denial analysis, appeal generation, and payer policy interpretation.
• Improve ability to read and reason over real clinical and financial data, covering model behavior, prompting, fine-tuning, retrieval, structured reasoning, verification, and evaluation.
• Build and improve agentic browser-use and computer-use capabilities for payer portals and healthcare software.
• Translate product feedback from live provider and payer workflows into research problems, partnering with backend engineers to productionize research improvements.

Skills

ML research

Language models

NLP

Evals

Reinforcement learning

Agentic systems

Model improvements

Tools

Production ML systems

Job description

Backbone, building the clinical AI layer for healthcare payments, is seeking a Founding Engineer, Applied Research in San Francisco. You’ll tackle applied research problems that power real-world decision making in claims, denials, and payer policies, translating research into production features.

Work spans model improvements, evals, and engineering collaboration to read charts and clinical data, with impact across workflows and budgets.