
Job Description
Senior Forward Deployed Engineer
Hippocratic AI is building the world's first healthcare-only, safety-focused LLM platform. As a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, you're an AI systems designer who drives innovation and solves cutting-edge problems in healthcare conversational AI. You develop sophisticated AI systems, anticipate customer needs, and shape how Hippocratic AI deploys advanced LLM techniques at scale. You balance ambitious innovation with production reliability, combining deep AI expertise with architectural thinking.
This role owns the full technical vision for complex AI deployments: architecting advanced RAG systems, designing sophisticated tool-calling and MCP integration patterns, implementing cutting-edge LLM techniques, anticipating and solving customer problems proactively, ensuring production reliability across multiple systems, and mentoring other engineers. You work closely with Deployment Strategists and CSEs to deliver AI agents that set the standard for innovation and reliability in healthcare.
What Success Looks Like
Cutting-Edge AI Innovation: You design sophisticated AI solutions using advanced LLM techniques (multi-turn reasoning, complex RAG, LLM-as-judge); solve novel healthcare AI challenges that move the category forward
Proactive Problem-Solving: You identify customer issues early through deep monitoring and proactive communication, often solving problems before they impact clinical operations
Advanced System Design: You architect complex AI systems with sophisticated RAG pipelines, nuanced tool-calling strategies, and advanced LLM techniques that solve novel customer problems
Production Excellence: You own production reliability across multiple deployments, anticipate failure modes, implement proactive monitoring, and drive continuous reliability improvements
Technical Leadership: You serve as the technical authority for complex, novel deployments; guide architectural decisions; mentor other engineers on AI techniques
Customer Technical Partnership: You partner with sophisticated customer IT teams on complex challenges, explaining architectural choices, and collaborating on optimizations
Core Responsibilities
AI Innovation & Architecture – Design cutting-edge AI solutions to novel healthcare challenges; architect advanced RAG, tool-calling, and LLM technique approaches
Advanced RAG System Design – Design and implement advanced retrieval-augmented generation systems; optimize for relevance, latency, and cost; handle complex data sources and sophisticated chunking strategies
Advanced LLM Techniques – Apply sophisticated LLM engineering patterns (LLM-as-judge, multi-turn reasoning, complex prompt engineering); optimize agent behavior for production reliability
Proactive Customer Problem-Solving – Anticipate customer issues; propose proactive AI-driven solutions; identify optimization opportunities
Production Architecture & Operations – Design infrastructure for high-reliability AI systems; implement comprehensive monitoring, logging, and incident response; ensure systems meet production standards
Complex Deployments – Lead technical execution for sophisticated, novel deployments; own integration architecture; solve complex AI challenges creatively
Team Mentoring & Technical Leadership – Mentor junior FDEs on AI development and production patterns; contribute to technical standards and best practices
What You Bring
Must Haves
5-7 years of software engineering experience with expert-level Python and production software systems expertise
Advanced hands-on experience with LLM frameworks (LangChain, LangSmith); deep understanding of RAG, tool calling, and advanced LLM patterns; experience solving novel AI problems
Proven ability to architect and implement complex AI systems; experience designing systems for reliability and scale
Experience with sophisticated integrations and enterprise systems; strong understanding of systems reliability, error handling, and operational patterns.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field from a top ranked university.
Nice to Haves
Experience designing and optimizing advanced RAG systems at scale; deep knowledge of retrieval strategies, embedding models, or vector databases
Hands-on experience with Model Context Protocol (MCP) or similar sophisticated tool integration approaches
Healthcare IT experience (EHR integrations, FHIR, HL7, healthcare data standards)
Experience mentoring engineers or leading technical initiatives; contributions to AI/ML open source projects
Track record of driving innovation in AI systems or solving novel technical challenges
Why Hippocratic AI
You're architecting the future of AI in healthcare. You're designing sophisticated systems that solve cutting-edge healthcare AI challenges. Your RAG architectures, tool-calling patterns, advanced LLM techniques, and production systems directly transform healthcare operations at scale. This is architectural-level impact on healthcare innovation.
You work with world-class AI engineers and clinical experts. The team includes AI pioneers from Google, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA and clinical leaders from Johns Hopkins, Washington University, Stanford. You'll tackle the hardest AI innovation problems with the sharpest minds. You'll grow faster here than almost anywhere.
Backed by $404M from top-tier AI and healthcare investors—CapitalG, a16z, General Catalyst, plus health system validators like UHS, Cincinnati Children's, WellSpan. You're not betting on unproven ideas; you're building on validated market demand and deep institutional support. Focus on technical excellence at scale.
This is category creation in AI-native healthcare delivery. You're defining how LLM agents interact with healthcare systems, how sophisticated RAG enables clinical AI, how to deploy advanced AI techniques safely. You're writing the playbooks. Every system you build contributes to transforming how healthcare uses AI.
Ready to Apply?
If you've built production AI systems, thrive at the edge of technical and human complexity, and want your work to matter in the most direct sense possible — we'd like to meet you.
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.
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Job Details
- Department
- Product/Design
- Category
- Software
- Employment Type
- Full Time
- Location
- Menlo Park, CA
- Posted
About Hippocratic AI
Hippocratic AI has developed a safety-focused Large Language Model (LLM) for healthcare. The company believes that a safe LLM can dramatically improve healthcare accessibility and health outcomes in the world by bringing deep healthcare expertise to every human. No other technology has the potential to have this level of global impact on health. The company was co-founded by CEO Munjal Shah, alongside a group of physicians, hospital administrators, healthcare professionals, and artificial intelligence researchers from El Camino Health, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Microsoft, Google, and NVIDIA. Hippocratic AI has received a total of $278 million in funding and is backed by leading investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, NVIDIA’s NVentures, Premji Invest, SV Angel, and six health systems. For more information on Hippocratic AI, www.HippocraticAI.com. 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. If anything appears suspicious, stop engaging immediately and report the incident.
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