Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform

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 Software Engineer at Ambience, you’ll play a pivotal role in building the Data Platform from the ground up to power cutting-edge healthcare AI. Your work will ensure seamless data ingestion, high data quality, and actionable insights across the company. This is a high-impact, cross-functional role that partners closely with product managers, engineers, and business stakeholders to architect robust pipelines and deliver analytics solutions that power data-informed decisions. From automating data ingestion to delivering insights to clinicians and product teams, you’ll architect systems that fuel everything we do with data.

Our Engineering roles are hybrid in our SF office 3x/week.

What You’ll Do:

• Power AI with Great Data: Build scalable pipelines to ingest, validate, and transform data—laying the foundation for reliable AI systems and model development.

• Enable Insights Across Teams: Partner with engineering, clinical, and product teams to design clear, actionable dashboards and analytics that guide decision-making and improve healthcare outcomes.

• Architect Scalable Infrastructure: Define best practices around warehousing, indexing, and governance to ensure our data systems are secure, maintainable, and ready for rapid innovation.

• Automate Data Ingestion Workflows: Build file-based ingestion pipelines enabling plug-and-play onboarding of external data sources. Develop automated validation, triggering, and error-handling mechanisms for real-time data availability.

• Establish Validation & Transformation Pipelines: Implement data validation frameworks using Python or TypeScript, and design transformation layers (SQL, dbt) that standardize and cleanse raw data for analysis and operational workflows.

• Deliver Actionable Analytics: Maintain analytical schemas and materialized views in SQL. Build dashboards that make data accessible and insightful for technical and non-technical users alike.

Who You Are:

Technical Expertise

• 7+ years in a production Data Engineering role and 2+ years in Software Engineering (or equivalent).

• Strong command of SQL for performance tuning, transformations, and data modeling.

• Proficient in scripting languages like Python or TypeScript.

• Comfortable building and maintaining data pipelines (ETL/ELT), data lakes, or warehouses in modern cloud environments.

• Strong understanding of data validation, schema design, and scalable architectures.

Collaborative Communicator

• Bridges technical and non-technical teams with ease.

• Leads discussions, gathers requirements, and simplifies complex data concepts for diverse stakeholders.

• Comfortable drafting design docs and presenting to cross-functional teams.

Mission-Aligned

• Passionate about mission-driven work and excited by the opportunity to impact healthcare outcomes with data.

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

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience in early-stage startups or building systems from scratch.

• Prior work in highly regulated industries (e.g., healthcare, finance).

• Involvement in hiring or mentoring for Data Engineering roles.

Pay Transparency

The base compensation for this role is approximately $200,000–$275,000 per year, excluding equity or bonus targets. We’ve intentionally allocated a wider range so that candidates have more flexibility to choose the desired cash/equity split that works for them. Philosophically, we lean towards generous equity grants so that our team truly gets to share in the impact they create.

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