Physician AI Researcher

pharos claims services; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Founding team equity

Direct patient safety impact

Culture of mission-driven startup

Job summary

Pharos is building AI-powered reporting and analytics to improve patient safety in hospitals. As a Physician AI Researcher, you will bridge clinical expertise and AI development on the founding team, shaping requirements, data curation, model evaluation, and real-world deployment.

You will collaborate with engineering and product teams, translate clinical needs into technical requirements, validate outputs for safety, and engage with hospital partners to understand workflows and safety

Qualifications

• Medical degree (MD, MBBS, MBChB, or equivalent) with active or recent clinical practice.
• Deep understanding of hospital workflows and patient safety processes.
• Strong Python programming skills for data analysis.
• Ability to think analytically and critically about data and models.
• Excellent communication skills across clinicians, engineers, and stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the clinical voice in discussions, ensuring clinical validity and real-world applicability.
• Design, prototype, implement, and evaluate AI/ML models for healthcare quality reporting.
• Define clinical data requirements, curate datasets, and ensure data quality.
• Rigorously evaluate model outputs for clinical accuracy and safety.
• Provide domain expertise on hospital workflows and clinical terminology.
• Stay current with clinical AI research and patient safety frameworks.
• Design prompts and workflows for LLMs applied to clinical text.
• Collaborate with product and engineering to translate clinical needs into features.
• Engage with hospital partners to understand workflows and pain points.
• Create clinical documentation, model cards, and validation reports.

Skills

Python programming

Clinical data analysis

Communication with stakeholders

Critical thinking

Hospital workflows knowledge

Education

MD or equivalent clinical degree

Tools

Python

Job description

Company Overview

Pharos is an early-stage startup dedicated to improving patient safety in hospitals through advanced AI-powered reporting and analytics. Our mission is to make healthcare safer by automating hospital quality reporting and helping staff identify and prevent the root causes of avoidable harm. Our vision is an AI system reviewing every chart at scale, identifying patterns and giving clinicians the insights they need to prevent the 100k avoidable deaths that occur in U.S. hospitals every year.

About the Role

This is a pivotal role as a founding member of the clinical AI research team at Pharos. As a Physician AI Researcher, you will bridge the critical gap between clinical expertise and AI development, ensuring our technology is both technically sophisticated and clinically sound. You will work in close partnership with the engineering team, bringing essential clinical perspective to every stage of product development.

The scope of this role is intentionally broad - you will be an integral part of the founding team, working at the intersection of clinical medicine, AI research, and product development. You'll be defining clinical requirements, curating datasets, developing and evaluating AI models, validating outputs for clinical accuracy, and helping translate complex medical knowledge into systems that work in real-world hospital settings. Your work will directly contribute to Pharos’s core mission: improving patient safety and ultimately saving lives by making healthcare safer.

What You'll Do

• Clinical-AI Bridge: Serve as the essential clinical voice in technical discussions, product decisions, and model development, ensuring clinical validity and real-world applicability of all our systems.

• Model Development: Design, prototype, implement, and evaluate AI/ML models for healthcare quality reporting, patient safety monitoring, and clinical decision support.

• Data Curation & Annotation: Define clinical data requirements, create annotation schemas, curate training datasets, and ensure data quality for model development.

• Clinical Validation: Rigorously evaluate model outputs for clinical accuracy, safety, and utility. Identify edge cases, failure modes, and potential patient safety concerns.

• Domain Expertise: Provide deep clinical knowledge about hospital workflows, quality metrics, safety events, medical terminology and clinical documentation.

• Research & Literature: Stay current with clinical AI research, healthcare quality literature, and patient safety frameworks. Apply evidence-based approaches to our work.

• Context Engineering & LLM Development: Design, test, and optimize prompts and workflows for large language models applied to clinical text and medical records.

• Product Collaboration: Work closely with the product and engineering teams to translate clinical needs into technical requirements and user-facing features.

• Hospital Engagement: Participate in conversations with hospital partners to understand their workflows, pain points, and requirements.

• Documentation: Create clinical documentation, model cards, validation reports, and materials for regulatory submissions.

What We're Looking For

Required:

• Medical Training: Medical degree (MD, MBBS, MBChB, MB BChir, or equivalent) with active or recent clinical practice experience.

• Hospital Knowledge: Deep understanding of hospital workflows, quality processes, patient safety frameworks, and clinical operations.

• Coding Proficiency: Strong programming skills in Python, including experience with data analysis libraries.

• Analytical Thinking: Ability to approach problems systematically, think critically about data and models, and identify potential issues before they occur.

• Communication: Excellent ability to communicate complex clinical and technical concepts to diverse audiences including clinicians, engineers, and business stakeholders.

Strongly Preferred:

• AI/ML Development: Hands-on experience developing or evaluating AI/ML models, especially in healthcare applications.

• NLP Experience: Experience with natural language processing (NLP) or large language models (LLMs) applied to clinical text.

• Quality/Safety Background: Background in quality improvement, patient safety, clinical research, or healthcare administration.

• Healthcare Informatics: Deep understanding of healthcare data, electronic health records (EHRs), medical terminology, clinical documentation, and hospital quality processes.

• Interoperability Standards: Experience working with healthcare interoperability standards such as FHIR and HL7, including parsing FHIR resources, working with FHIR APIs, processing HL7 messages, and understanding healthcare data exchange challenges.

Personal Attributes:

• High agency: You’re excited by the opportunity to take ambiguous clinical and technical challenges, and drive them from idea to execution without waiting for direction.

• Motivated by impact: You’re energized to work hard as part of a high-performing team - holding a meaningful equity stake in a company with the real potential to save thousands of lives.

• Ownership mindset: You take pride in acting like an owner, taking full responsibility for the quality and outcomes of your work.

• Comfortable with ambiguity: You thrive in an early-stage startup environment where there’s no rigid hierarchy, everyone wears many hats, and you have real power to influence the path of the company.
  

What We Offer

• Foundational Impact: A rare chance to build a category-defining healthcare AI company from the ground up and directly improve patient outcomes at scale.

• Clinical + Technical Growth: Unique opportunity to develop expertise at the intersection of clinical medicine and cutting-edge AI research.

• Ownership and Autonomy: Take ownership of critical clinical AI systems and have autonomy in your research approach.

• Significant Outcome Potential: Meaningful equity stake as a founding team member.

• Mission-Driven Work: Every day, work on technology that has the potential to prevent avoidable patient harm and save lives.

• Culture Creation: Actively shape a positive, collaborative, innovative, and mission-driven culture that values both clinical excellence and technical rigor.

Location

• San Francisco, USA.

• We expect our core team to be in the office most working days.