Staff Machine Learning Engineer

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 equip every healthcare worker with an advanced AI co-pilot. We believe that people, augmented by AI, will enable us to deliver higher quality healthcare at a lower cost, improving the experience for everyone involved.

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 Machine Learning Engineer at Ambience, you will help guide our AI team’s technical direction, 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 other engineers to turn cutting-edge research into production-grade solutions.

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

What You’ll Do:

• Architect our AI Roadmap: Identify high-priority projects and shape our AI strategy, ensuring we balance near-term product needs with longer-term research opportunities.

• Scale Model Evaluation: Collaborate with clinical and engineering teams to establish robust evaluation pipelines, track performance metrics, and integrate real-world feedback.

• Explore Frontier Model Development: Experiment with the latest model architectures and optimization techniques, focusing on real-world improvements in accuracy, reliability, and efficiency.

• Evolve Data Pipelines: Architect systems for capturing and curating training data, prioritizing the most challenging and valuable clinical use cases to continuously improve models.

• Stay at the Cutting Edge: Distill insights from recent AI research—particularly in LLMs, NLP, and speech recognition—and champion experiments that keep Ambience on the forefront of innovation.

Who You Are:

• Deep ML & NLP Fundamentals

  • 7+ years in a production ML or research engineering role

  • Mastery of modern neural networks (e.g., transformers) and advanced evaluation techniques

  • Familiar with the latest literature and able to translate research into applied experiments

  • Direct experience with LLMs (applied or research)

• Production-Grade SWE Skills

  • Proficient in Python and a major deep learning framework (PyTorch preferred)

  • Comfortable with modern MLOps, CI/CD for ML, and containerization for deployment

• Data-Centric AI Development

  • Experience building and maintaining large, high-quality datasets

  • Skilled at leveraging user feedback to refine and iterate on 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

  • Track record as an interviewer or hiring manager for ML roles

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