Staff AI Engineer (Clinical LLMs & Speech)
Posted on September 03, 2025 (21 days ago)
About Us:
Ambience Healthcare is the leading AI platform for documentation, coding, and clinical workflow, built to reduce administrative burden and protect revenue integrity at the point of care. Trusted by top health systems across North America, Ambiences platform is live across outpatient, emergency, and inpatient settings, supporting more than 100 specialties with real-time, coding-aware documentation. The platform integrates directly with Epic, Oracle Cerner, athenahealth, and other major EHRs. Founded in 2020 by Mike Ng and Nikhil Buduma, Ambience is headquartered in San Francisco and backed by Oak HC/FT, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), OpenAI Startup Fund, Kleiner Perkins, and other leading investors.
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 Machine Learning Engineer at Ambience, you will help guide the technical direction of our AI team, identifying the most impactful opportunities to build, refine, and deploy machine learning systems that enhance clinical outcomes. This role is both strategic and hands-on, requiring close collaboration with clinicians, product managers, and fellow engineers to turn cutting-edge research into production-grade solutions.
Our engineering roles are hybrid working onsite at our San Francisco office three days per week.
What Youll Do:
- Define and Drive the AI Roadmap: Co-develop a 12‑month technical plan balancing quick product wins with longer‑term research bets, and lead execution on near-term priorities.
- Build Trustworthy Evaluation Systems: Launch an automated evaluation pipeline tying offline metrics (precision, recall, latency) to live clinician feedback, surfacing quality trends in a single dashboard
- Deliver Measurable Quality Gains: Prototype and A/B-test model improvements that significantly reduce top user-reported error classes across multiple clinical applications.
- Level‑up our data engine: Design an active-learning loop that flags challenging clinical examples for re-labeling, reducing review time while improving downstream model performance.
- Stay at the cutting edge: Distill insights from recent researchparticularly in LLMs, NLP, and speech recognition—and drive experiments that keep Ambience at the forefront of clinical AI.
Who You Are:
- Expert in ML and NLP Fundamentals
- 7+ years in a production ML or research engineering role
- Deep expertise with modern neural networks (e.g., transformers) and advanced evaluation techniques.
- Strong fluency with recent AI literature and ability to translate research into practical applications.
- Production-Grade Software Engineer
- Proficient in Python and deep learning frameworks (PyTorch preferred).
- Comfortable with modern MLOps, CI/CD workflows for ML, and containerized deployments.
- Data-Centric AI Developer
- Skilled at building and maintaining large, high-quality datasets.
- Experienced in leveraging user feedback and active learning to improve model and data pipelines.
- Effective Interdisciplinary Collaborator
- Able to work alongside clinicians, product managers, and fellow engineers
- Strong communicator who can simplify 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
- Experience as an interviewer or hiring manager for ML roles.
- Prior work in healthcare, clinical AI, or other regulated, high-stakes industries.
- Open-source contributions to ML libraries, evaluation suites, or benchmarking tools.
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, quarterly retreats, unlimited PTO, and a 401(k) plan