Software Engineer, AI Research & Prototyping

Sage Care; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Sage Care in Palo Alto is seeking a Software Engineer to own the AI pipeline from idea to evidence, staying close to research trends and the voice AI ecosystem.

You will design experiments, build rapid prototypes on production data, and turn investigations into team-usable artifacts with benchmarks, deep dives, or evidence-backed recommendations.

Collaborating with platform engineers, you will hand off validated ideas for production and help the team explain the stack choices six months in.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of software engineering or applied ML experience.
• Strong coding skills and ability to run experiments end-to-end without infra support.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs: prompting and evaluation.
• Experimental rigor: tests with controls and baselines.
• Experience teaching or sharing knowledge (talks, writings, open source).
• Intellectual honesty: reporting when ideas don’t work.

Responsibilities

• Track emerging voice AI techniques and identify what matters for us.
• Build rapid prototypes and test against real conversation data or in development.
• Run head-to-head evaluations of models, providers, and techniques.
• Turn investigations into team-usable artifacts: benchmarks or deep-dives.
• Collaborate with platform engineers to hand off validated ideas for production.

Skills

Years of software engineering

LLMs experience

Experiment design

Coding proficiency

Teaching/knowledge transfer

Integrity/ honesty in results

Education

MS/PhD in CS or ML

Job description

About Sage Care

Sage Care is a fast-growing, early-stage healthcare startup founded by exceptional leaders from Apple, Uber, Carbon Health and backed by top-tier venture capital (General Catalyst, Chelsea Clinton). With a strong customer pipeline, Sage Care is transforming healthcare by simplifying care navigation.

Sage Care is a fast-growing, early-stage healthcare startup founded by exceptional leaders from Apple, Uber, Carbon Health and backed by top-tier venture capital (General Catalyst, Chelsea Clinton). With a strong customer pipeline, Sage Care is transforming healthcare by simplifying care navigation.

Our platform makes it easier for patients to find the right doctor, helps providers focus on those who need them most, and ensures faster access to care, delivering better care and stronger economic outcomes at scale through harnessing the latest AI innovations.

Building on our successful collaborations with health systems across the U.S., we have expanded internationally to the MENA region. We are now partnering with health systems there to deploy our AI-powered care navigation platform.

About The Role

AI is moving fast. New models, new orchestration patterns, and new evaluation techniques appear every month, and some of them would make our agents meaningfully better.

We are hiring a Software Engineer to own that pipeline from idea to evidence.

You will stay close to what is emerging in the research community and the voice AI ecosystem, design experiments we can trust, and turn promising ideas into tested prototypes on real production data. Just as importantly, you will teach: every investigation you run ends in something the team can use, whether that is a benchmarked prototype, a technical deep-dive, or a clear recommendation with evidence behind it.

What You\'ll Do

• Track emerging techniques in voice AI and agents orchestration, and identify which ones matter for us
• Build rapid prototypes and test them against real conversation data or within engineering development process
• Run head-to-head evaluations of models, providers, and techniques (reasoning approaches, speech models, orchestration patterns)
• Turn every investigation into a team-usable artifact: a benchmark, a written deep-dive, a tech talk, or a recommendation with evidence
• Work with platform engineers to hand off validated ideas for production implementation

Required

What We\'re Looking For

• 3+ years of software engineering or applied ML experience
• Strong coding skills; able to build and run your own experiments end-to-end without infrastructure support
• Hands-on experience with LLMs: prompting, evaluation, and an intuition for how model behavior changes across techniques and providers
• Experimental rigor: experience designing tests with controls, baselines, and honest measurement
• A track record of teaching or knowledge transfer in some form: teaching or TA experience, workshops, technical writing, internal tech talks, well-documented open source, or developer education
• Intellectual honesty: comfortable reporting that a promising idea did not work

Nice to Have

• Advanced degree (MS/PhD) in CS, ML, or a related field, or equivalent research experience
• Experience with voice or speech systems (STT, TTS, real-time pipelines)
• Publications, technical blog posts, or open-source work we can read
• Experience taking a prototype through to production with an engineering team
• Experience evaluating AI systems in healthcare or other high-stakes domains

What Success Looks Like

• The team learns about relevant new techniques from you
• Ideas are adopted or killed based on evidence
• Validated prototypes hand off cleanly to platform engineers, with the reasoning documented
• Six months in, engineers across the team can explain why our stack makes the choices it makes
• Our AI decisions get faster and more confident because the evidence base keeps growing