Senior Staff Engineer, Developer Infrastructure & Experience
Job Description
About Us
Hippocratic AI is the leading generative AI company in healthcare. We have the only system that can have safe, autonomous, clinical conversations with patients. We have trained our own LLMs as part of our Polaris constellation, resulting in a system with over 99.9% accuracy.
Why Join Our Team
Reinvent healthcare with AI that puts safety first. We’re building the world’s first healthcare-only, safety-focused LLM — a breakthrough platform designed to transform patient outcomes at a global scale. This is category creation.
Work with the people shaping the future. Hippocratic AI was co-founded by CEO Munjal Shah and a team of physicians, hospital leaders, AI pioneers, and researchers from institutions like El Camino Health, Johns Hopkins, Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and NVIDIA.
Backed by the world’s leading healthcare and AI investors. We recently raised a $126M Series C at a $3.5B valuation, led by Avenir Growth, bringing total funding to $404M with participation from CapitalG, General Catalyst, a16z, Kleiner Perkins, Premji Invest, UHS, Cincinnati Children’s, WellSpan Health, John Doerr, Rick Klausner, and others.
Build alongside the best in healthcare and AI. Join experts who’ve spent their careers improving care, advancing science, and building world-changing technologies — ensuring our platform is powerful, trusted, and truly transformative.
Location Requirement
We believe the best ideas happen together. To support fast collaboration and a strong team culture, this role is expected to be in our Palo Alto office five days a week, unless otherwise specified.
About the Role
As a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Hippocratic AI, you’ll define the engineering standards, CI/CD infrastructure, and developer platform that let a safety-critical healthcare AI company ship with confidence. You’ll architect the foundational systems that power reliable, testable, and incrementally deployable software across every product and partner deployment — operating at the intersection of software craftsmanship, production engineering discipline, and AI-first development workflows.
This is a senior individual contributor role in Engineering, reporting to the VP of Engineering. You’ll set direction across the full software delivery lifecycle — testing architecture, build and release pipelines, feature flag strategy, observability, and developer tooling — partnering directly with ML researchers, clinical advisors, and product leaders to turn ambiguous requirements into production systems robust enough for healthcare contexts.
From establishing the design patterns that keep a fast-growing codebase comprehensible and testable by humans, to building the deployment infrastructure that makes frequent, safe releases possible, your work will determine how Hippocratic AI ships software for years to come.
We’re looking for senior staff-level engineers who have already built and scaled software systems across multiple technology generations — people who identify the structural problems others haven’t seen yet, set the technical bar for an entire organization, and bring others along with them.
What You’ll Do
Define the engineering standards and quality bar across the organization. Set and uphold best practices for code structure, testing architecture, observability, and deployment. Lead by example in code reviews and system design discussions in ways that raise the floor for every engineer around you.
Own production readiness end-to-end. Build and ship features where testability, observability, incremental deployability, and safe rollback are design constraints from day one — not afterthoughts. Define what ‘done’ means across the engineering org and enforce it without becoming a bottleneck.
Architect for testability and modularity at scale. Bring structural discipline to a codebase that must grow quickly without rotting. Champion clean interfaces, dependency inversion, and appropriate layering — the design patterns that make complex, AI-powered production systems comprehensible and testable by humans.
Own the end-to-end CI/CD pipeline and release infrastructure. Design and implement staged rollout strategies — canary deployments, blue/green releases, progressive delivery — that give the team confidence to ship frequently without gambling on reliability in a clinical environment.
Establish and steward feature flag and safe deployment practices. Build the infrastructure for gradual rollouts, controlled experimentation, and fast recovery. Make incremental delivery the default across the engineering org, not the exception.
Multiply developer velocity through systematic tooling improvements. Identify and eliminate friction across the development lifecycle — local environments, test infrastructure, build speeds, linting, and inner-loop performance. Make the team measurably faster without accumulating new technical debt.
Operate fluently in an AI-assisted development environment. Use AI-powered coding tools, automated test generation, and LLM-assisted debugging as force multipliers. Help the broader team adopt these workflows thoughtfully — capturing the speed gains while maintaining the engineering rigor a safety-critical platform demands.
Serve as the technical voice across Clinical, ML, and Product. Translate between ML researchers, clinical advisors, and product managers. Turn ambiguous, cross-functional requirements into systems that are robust, maintainable, and safe to operate in healthcare contexts.
Treat patient safety as a first-class engineering concern. Our software runs in clinical environments where reliability directly impacts patient outcomes. Bring that gravity — not as a constraint on velocity, but as a design principle — to every architectural decision, deployment practice, and incident response.
What You Bring
Must-Have
BS in Computer Science or equivalent
12+ years of software engineering experience with production ownership at scale across multiple organizations
Proven track record across multiple technology generations with clear, transferable judgment.
Deep backend fluency in Python, Go, or Java; comfortable across the full stack.
Strong command of software design: modularity, testability, separation of concerns, dependency inversion.
Hands-on CI/CD ownership — building, operating, and improving pipelines in production.
Production experience with feature flags, canary deployments, blue/green, and progressive rollouts.
Demonstrated impact improving developer experience and internal tooling.
Fluency with AI-assisted development tools — Copilot, LLM-based code generation, automated testing.
Strong communicator across engineering, product, and clinical stakeholders.
Committed to software safety, engineering rigor, and patient-centered outcomes.
Nice-to-Have
Experience in healthcare, life sciences, or a regulated, safety-critical industry.
Familiarity with ML infrastructure, model serving, or LLM evaluation pipelines.
Experience building engineering culture at a high-growth startup.
Background in platform engineering or DevEx.
Hands-on observability experience: structured logging, distributed tracing, SLO design.
If you’re an experienced engineer who thrives at the intersection of engineering rigor and real-world impact in a safety-critical domain, we’d love to hear from you. Join Hippocratic AI and help shape the software foundation for clinically safe AI that is already transforming patient care at scale.
Please be aware of recruitment scams impersonating Hippocratic AI. All recruiting communication will come from @hippocraticai.com email addresses. We will never request payment or sensitive personal information during the hiring process.