Staff Research Engineer

Ambience Healthcare, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 250,000 - 350,000; Full time

Job summary

Join a forward-thinking company dedicated to revolutionizing healthcare through AI. As a Staff Research Engineer, you'll collaborate with top researchers to push the boundaries of generative AI, transforming cutting-edge research into practical applications. This role offers the chance to prototype innovative AI systems, drive research-first experimentation, and shape data strategies that enhance healthcare delivery. With a competitive salary, significant equity, and a mission-driven culture, you'll be part of a team that is making a real difference in the lives of healthcare providers and patients alike.

Benefits

Health, dental, and vision coverage

Paid maternity/paternity leave

Unlimited PTO

401(k) plan

Dedicated budget for personal development

Quarterly retreats

Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience in machine learning research or applied AI engineering.
• Hands-on experience fine-tuning large language models.

Responsibilities

• Build and benchmark LLM-based systems and agents using open-source models.
• Translate academic papers into reproducible experiments.

Skills

Machine Learning Research

LLM Fine-Tuning

Python

Deep Learning Frameworks

Data Curation

Experiment Design

Collaboration

Education

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field

Master's or PhD in Machine Learning or related field

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

Hugging Face Transformers

Job description

About Us:

Ambience is developing the most capable AI systems for healthcare and medicine. As healthcare costs soar to 17.3% of US GDP and a projected shortage of 100,000 physicians within the next decade, the need for AI is critical. Our frontline healthcare workers are overwhelmed, with only 27% of the average clinician's day spent on direct patient care.

Our vision is to advance healthcare by empowering clinicians with safe, intelligent AI agents that improve quality, reduce costs, and enhance both patient and provider experiences.

Headquartered in San Francisco, we have secured $100M in funding from top investors, including Kleiner Perkins, OpenAI Startup Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Optum Ventures, Human Capital, and Martin Ventures. We collaborate with leading AI experts such as Jeff Dean, Richard Socher, Pieter Abbeel, and AIX Ventures.

Join us in the endeavor of accelerating the path to safe & useful clinical super intelligence by becoming part of our community of problem solvers, technologists, clinicians, and innovators.

The Role:

As a Staff Research Engineer at Ambience, you will push the boundaries of generative AI by translating cutting-edge research into working prototypes and experimental platforms. You’ll work closely with fellow researchers, engineers, and product leads to explore novel architectures, fine-tuning methods, evaluation paradigms, and data strategies—helping to define what’s possible with frontier AI models.

Our engineering roles are hybrid — working onsite at our San Francisco office three days per week.

What You’ll Do:

• Prototype and Advance LLM Systems: Build and benchmark LLM-based systems and agents using open-source and proprietary models. Rapidly prototype new capabilities through fine-tuning, adapters, and reinforcement learning approaches.

• Drive Research-First Experimentation: Translate recent academic papers into reproducible experiments, focusing on fine-tuning (e.g., LoRA, QLoRA, DPO), model alignment, and hallucination mitigation techniques. Design clear experiment plans and share findings across the team.

• Build and Evolve Evaluation Pipelines: Define evaluation methodologies using human-in-the-loop feedback, synthetic benchmarks, and task-specific metrics. Implement continuous evaluation pipelines to track regressions and breakthroughs.

• Shape Data and Training Strategy: Curate datasets via synthetic generation, targeted scraping, and annotation pipelines. Establish practices for discovering failure cases and improving model robustness over time.

• Contribute to a Research-Driven Culture: Write research papers, internal memos, and blog posts. Foster a culture of experimentation, documentation, and knowledge-sharing across research and engineering teams.

Who You Are:

• Research Fluent

  • Skilled at interpreting and replicating results from cutting-edge machine learning research.

  • Experienced in designing experiments, running ablation studies, and ensuring reproducibility.

  • 4+ years of experience in machine learning research, experimental AI, or applied AI engineering.

  • Demonstrated ability to replicate, extend, or publish original research.

• Deep Expertise in LLM Fine-Tuning

  • Hands-on experience fine-tuning large language models and optimizing prompt and embedding strategies.

  • Proficient with Python and deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch, JAX, and Hugging Face Transformers.

  • Comfortable with distributed training environments and large-scale model experimentation.

• Evaluation and Data Obsessed

  • Deep understanding of dataset curation, filtering, and alignment with evaluation goals.

  • Familiar with human annotation pipelines, ranking models (e.g., RM, RLAIF), and interpretability techniques.

  • Experienced in building evaluation frameworks tied to real-world task performance.

• Collaborative and Curious

  • Thrives in research-driven environments with a commitment to experimentation, documentation, and cross-functional learning.

  • Excited to prototype, present findings, and build at the frontier of AI advancement.

• Effective Interdisciplinary Collaborator

  • Able to work alongside clinicians, product managers, and fellow engineers

  • Strong communicator who can distill complex ML concepts for diverse audiences.

• Mission-Aligned

  • Passion for healthcare or other mission-driven industries (e.g., education, climate tech)

  • Thrives in a fast-paced, early-stage environment; takes extreme ownership of deliverables

• Nice-to-haves

  • Open-source contributions to ML libraries, datasets, or benchmarks

  • Experience working in AI research labs, frontier model companies, or early-stage AI startups

  • Background in RLHF, alignment research, or AI safety

Compensation

$250,000 - $350,000, with the addition of significant equity.

Are you outside of the range? We encourage you to still apply; we take an individualized approach to ensure that compensation accounts for all of the life factors that matter for each candidate.

Being at Ambience:

• An opportunity to work with cutting edge AI technology, on a product that dramatically improves the quality of life for healthcare providers and the quality of care they can provide to their patients

• Dedicated budget for personal development, including access to world class mentors, advisors, and an in-house executive coach

• Work alongside a world-class, diverse team that is deeply mission aligned

• Ownership over your success and the ability to significantly impact the growth of our company

• Competitive salary and equity compensation with benefits including health, dental, and vision coverage, paid maternity/paternity leave, quarterly retreats, unlimited PTO, and a 401(k) plan