Founding Member of Technical Staff

About this role

ABOUT THE ROLE

This is a founding engineering role at an early-stage healthtech / safety-critical AI startup building evidence infrastructure for AI model validation in medical diagnostics. As a Founding Member of Technical Staff, you will help shape the core reasoning methodology that underpins how AI safety claims are investigated, structured, and validated — across the full product lifecycle. You'll work directly alongside the founding team, contributing across technical domains and helping lay the infrastructure for the future of safety-critical AI.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Design and execute investigations into how AI models perform and fail across real-world scenarios.

- Analyze input data, model outputs, and internal representations to evaluate data quality, generalization limits, distribution shift, subgroup performance, and demographic bias.

- Surface failure modes and produce structured evidence that supports, challenges, or refines claims about model performance and safety.

- Develop and evolve the company's evidence methodology — defining how claims, arguments, and evidence should be structured for rigorous AI validation.

- Pressure-test assumptions, critique weak argument structures, and systematize repeated investigations into reusable methods, workflows, and platform primitives.

- Write production-quality Python, build agentic workflows for evidence investigation, and prototype front-end features using AI tooling.

- Contribute beyond your immediate technical domain — this is a founding role that requires ownership, versatility, and the willingness to challenge assumptions.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Required:

- Degree in CS, mathematics, physics, engineering, or a related quantitative field — or equivalent demonstrated depth.

- Strong ML, statistics, and data science fundamentals; ability to understand the math behind methods, identify broken assumptions, and reason about trade-offs.

- Expert Python skills, spanning raw data analysis through to platform-level code others will rely on.

- Strong engineering judgment on code structure, interface boundaries, and reusability trade-offs.

- Demonstrated ability to operate as a founding-team-caliber contributor — taking end-to-end ownership and contributing across domains.

- Strong cross-functional communication skills; able to present evidence, claims, and validation results to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

- Comfort using AI tooling as a primary mode of working.

- Authorized to work in the United States without visa sponsorship; able to work on-site in Sunnyvale, CA.

Nice to Have:

- 3–5 years of professional ML experience, or a PhD in model evaluation, robustness, out-of-distribution detection, interpretability, or a related area.

- Experience with AI/ML medical device submissions, FDA review processes, or other regulated environments (e.g., FDA 510(k), De Novo, EU AI Act).

- Background in safety case methodology in aviation, automotive, healthcare, or other safety-critical fields.

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS

- Salary: $150,000 – $200,000 USD annually

- Founding team equity and early-stage upside

LOCATION

On-site in Sunnyvale, CA, United States. This is a full-time, in-office role. Visa sponsorship is not available — candidates must be authorized to work in the US without sponsorship.

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