Senior Staff Software Engineer (AI)

TL;DR

Senior Staff Software Engineer (AI): Architecting foundational systems, CI/CD infrastructure, and developer platforms for a safety-critical healthcare AI company with an accent on software craftsmanship and production engineering. Focus on establishing engineering standards, improving developer velocity, and ensuring high reliability in clinical environments.

Location: On-site in Palo Alto (expected in office five days a week)

Company

Hippocratic AI is a leading generative AI company in healthcare developing safety-focused LLMs for autonomous clinical conversations with patients.

What you will do

• Define and uphold engineering standards, quality bars, and best practices for code structure and observability across the organization.
• Own production readiness end-to-end, ensuring testability and safe rollback are core design constraints.
• Architect modular, scalable systems and clean interfaces to prevent codebase rot during rapid growth.
• Design and implement CI/CD pipelines, including canary deployments, blue/green releases, and progressive delivery.
• Establish infrastructure for feature flags and controlled experimentation to enable incremental delivery.
• Multiply developer velocity by optimizing local environments, build speeds, and internal tooling.

Requirements

• BS in Computer Science or equivalent.
• 12+ years of software engineering experience with production ownership at scale.
• Deep backend fluency in Python, Go, or Java.
• Strong command of software design (modularity, dependency inversion, separation of concerns).
• Hands-on experience building and operating CI/CD pipelines, feature flags, and progressive rollouts.
• Must be based in Palo Alto and work from the office five days a week.

Nice to have

• Experience in healthcare, life sciences, or other regulated safety-critical industries.
• Familiarity with ML infrastructure, model serving, or LLM evaluation pipelines.
• Background in platform engineering, DevEx, or observability (SLO design, distributed tracing).
• Experience building engineering culture within a high-growth startup.

Culture & Benefits

• Opportunity to work on category-creating AI technology with a $3.5B valuation.
• Culture that treats patient safety as a first-class engineering design principle.
• Collaborative environment working alongside AI pioneers, physicians, and researchers.
• Focus on engineering rigor and high-impact, real-world healthcare outcomes.