Senior AI Engineer

Doctronic; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

Parental Leave: 12 weeks

Job summary

Doctronic invites a Senior AI Engineer to join a hybrid New York City or San Francisco team building the next generation of clinical AI. You will design architectures for reasoning, tool use, and safe decision-making, while shipping concrete systems that improve with experience.

You will work across research and engineering to advance retrieval, evaluation, and learning components, including RLHF, model training, and end-to-end demos for real patients.

Qualifications

• Advanced degree in a quantitative, computational, or scientific discipline.
• 3+ years of applied or research experience in AI/ML; or 7+ years building and researching ML systems.
• Experience with large language models and generative AI.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement the architecture behind the AI doctor, including reasoning, reflection, verification, tool use, routing, and escalation.
• Build systems for multiple agents/models to make clinical decisions safely and efficiently.
• Develop evaluation platforms, rubrics, simulations, and experiments to measure AI doctor performance and safety outcomes.

Skills

Agentic architectures

Reasoning systems

Tool use

Model evaluation

Experimentation

RLHF

Retrieval & RAG

Search & ranking

Strong ML fundamentals

Education

Advanced degree in quantitative/computational field

Tools

Python

PyTorch/TensorFlow

LLMs/Generative AI

Job description

Senior AI Engineer

New York City or San Francisco | Hybrid Onsite | Full Time

Mission

Let's make high-quality healthcare free and accessible to everyone through AI. Doctronic's AI doctor already handles millions of consultations; our goal is to scale to billions while continuously improving clinical safety and accuracy. That means advancing how AI systems reason, learn, retrieve evidence, and earn trust in real clinical care.

About the Role

Doctronic runs a real clinical practice, with patients consulting our AI doctor every day. That gives us a dataset no one else has to test ideas against. We're committed to publishing and open sourcing as we go.

You'll build the reasoning systems, learning methods, retrieval algorithms, and evaluation infrastructure that allow every component of Doctronic's clinical AI to improve with each iteration and earn greater autonomy over time.

This role blends research and engineering. What matters is real experimental or modeling work you can also ship, whether you come from applied ML or data science with strong engineering skills, or engineering with a research bent.

What You'll Build

Agentic Clinical Reasoning

• Design and implement the next generation of the architecture behind Doctronic's AI doctor, including reasoning, reflection, verification, tool use, routing, uncertainty handling, and escalation.

• Build systems in which specialized agents and models work together to make clinical decisions safely, reliably, and efficiently, with an architecture that supports self-improvement over time.

Evaluation and Measurement

• Build the evaluation platform, rubrics, simulations, and experiments that measure how the AI doctor performs and know when a benchmark score rewards the wrong behavior.

• Identify what should be improved, whether reasoning, retrieval, model behavior, data, or engineering, and determine whether each intervention genuinely made the system better.

Models and Learning

• Apply methods such as fine-tuning, distillation, reinforcement learning, preference optimization, and prompt and system optimization to improve specific components of the AI doctor.

• Build the training data, feedback, reward, and experimentation pipelines that turn evaluation results and clinical expertise into system improvements.

Search, Retrieval, and Grounding

• Build search, ranking, retrieval, and grounding algorithms that connect clinical reasoning to trusted medical evidence, partner‑specific content, and patient context.

• Improve and evaluate retrieval based on its effect on downstream clinical decisions, not only on document‑relevance metrics.

Wherever you're working, you'll own the problem end-to-end, from framing it to measuring whether it worked.

How We Work

• Builder‑first org: senior engineers who take ownership of a problem and run with it

• Autonomy here means moving fast on your own judgment and bringing in clinical, product, or engineering partners early when the problem calls for it, not after.

Who You Are

• You are a research‑minded engineer who wants to build intelligent systems and is equally serious about understanding and demonstrating their effectiveness.

• You have deep experience in at least two of the following:

  • Agentic architectures, reasoning systems, and tool use

  • Model evaluation, experimentation, and rubric design

  • Model training, fine‑tuning, distillation, or reinforcement learning

  • Search, ranking, retrieval, or RAG

• You have strong ML fundamentals, including training data, objectives, metrics, failure analysis, calibration, and validation.

• You're comfortable working in domains where ground truth is incomplete, and experts disagree, and where the right move is sometimes to question what "correct" even means before answering.

• You think through the business impact of your work and scope and prioritize solutions accordingly.

• You have strong engineering fundamentals, you build real systems, not just notebooks or one‑off experiments.

• You communicate clearly and collaborate well across engineering, clinical, and product teams.

Typically, candidates will have an advanced degree in a quantitative, computational, or scientific discipline and 3+ years of highly relevant applied or research experience in AI/ML; or 7+ years of relevant experience building and researching ML systems, including recent hands‑on work with LLMs and generative AI.

We care more about the depth of your work than a specific credential or career path.

Bonus Points

• Published research, patents, meaningful open‑source contributions, or novel production ML systems

• Experience building AI systems at an early‑stage or high‑growth company

• Experience in healthcare, clinical AI, or another regulated or safety‑critical domain, including familiarity with clinical workflows, healthcare data, or standards such as HIPAA, FHIR, EHR, and HL7

• Experience with human‑feedback systems, RLHF, simulation, or synthetic‑data generation

• Work in AI safety, bias detection, calibration, or fairness

What We Offer

• Competitive salary plus meaningful equity with real upside as we grow

• Build AI systems transforming healthcare for millions

• High autonomy and end‑to‑end ownership on problems that matter

• Work side by side with physician‑scientists

• Health benefits

• Parental Leave: 12 weeks fully paid parental leave for all parents, regardless of gender or path to parenthood — no distinction between birthing and non‑birthing parent

Funding and Momentum

Doctronic is backed by Union Square Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Abstract Ventures, with three rounds of financing completed between February 2025 and January 2026.

Doctronic is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.