Founding Engineer - Applied Research

Digital Waffle; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 160,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Job summary

Digital Waffle in the Bay Area is hiring a Founding Engineer, Applied Research to ship research-driven healthcare AI. You’ll help shape core intelligence from day one, working on charts, claims, denials and payer policies with a seed-stage startup mindset.

You’ll build evals and productionize research, collaborating with a small, focused team to move quickly and deliver real-world impact in healthcare technology.

Qualifications

• 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.
• Able to take ambiguous problems, scope them and deliver measurable real-world impact.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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.

Skills

ML research

Python

Evals & fine-tuning

Applied AI systems

Job description

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
• 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)

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