Forward Deployed AI Engineer

PicnicHealth•San Francisco, CA

9h•$160,000 - $190,000•Remote

About The Position

PicnicHealth is simplifying clinical research with AI, making it faster and cheaper to get new treatments to patients. We're bringing a patient-centered, AI-first approach to a $100b market otherwise dominated by old-school, services-driven incumbents. We're creating a streamlined operating system for clinical research, built on top of our AI for medical record data in trials and a personal health app that keeps patients engaged in their healthcare. The Opportunity We believe AI will fundamentally transform how clinical research is done. PicnicHealth is already proving this. Our AI processes medical records, engages patients, and powers study operations in ways that were impossible a few years ago. But we're just getting started, and the gap between what AI can do and what our teams actually use day-to-day is where the biggest leverage is. We have an AI team building powerful capabilities, and a Study Delivery team of scientists, biostatisticians, project managers, and patient recruitment specialists doing complex, high-stakes work. The Forward Deployed AI Engineer bridges that gap. You'll sit within our AI team, allowing you to leverage their expertise to develop faster and more effectively. Day-to-day, you’ll be embedded with Study Delivery, learning their workflows, understanding their pain points, and implementing immediate solutions using whatever gets the job done: internal AI tools, off-the-shelf software, scrappy one-off scripts, or adding new features directly to our platform. But this isn't just about quick fixes. You'll also inform the Product roadmap, to make sure we're building the right tools and infrastructure to enable Study Delivery on a longer time horizon. You're the feedback loop, translating operational reality into engineering priorities. What is clinical research and why will PicnicHealth win? Clinical research is the industry responsible for conducting studies to evaluate the effectiveness of drugs and treatments. Better trials lead to faster, more cost-effective drug development, ultimately resulting in more and improved treatments for patients. However, the process remains highly inefficient. Trials are a major bottleneck in drug development, and the promising advancements in biotech cannot translate to real patient impact unless clinical research becomes faster and more efficient The industry runs on outdated technology and manual processes. Research sites (hospitals, academic centers, doctors' offices) are overburdened and under-resourced. Contract research organizations (CROs), the organizations that traditionally run clinical trials for life sciences companies, typically throw hundreds-of-thousands of man-hours wrangling sites and cobbling together vendor software. PicnicHealth has built technology that uniquely positions us to run faster, cheaper, and more flexible studies while removing burden from sites: PicnicAI (trained on 350M+ clinician annotations over 100k+ patient records) is the only system that can effectively access and structure all participant EMR data trials need Our AI health assistant (NPS of 76 in 2024) guides participants through study activities and enables most to be done at home We're an integrated solution — virtual site, CRO, and software platform — with AI built in from the ground up, initially focusing on non-interventional research.

Requirements

Thriving in ambiguous environments where you need to find the right problems to solve, not just the right solutions, often by observing workflows firsthand rather than waiting for requests
Being energized by working directly with non-technical teams and building things that transform their operations
Moving fast and iterating, favoring working solutions over perfect architectures
3+ years of experience writing production software, with strong fundamentals in both Python and TypeScript
Comfort working across the stack, from React frontends to backend services, databases, and infrastructure
Experience building with LLMs or AI APIs, whether that's agents, RAG, prompt engineering, or integrating models into real workflows

Nice To Haves

Experience in life sciences, clinical research, or healthcare
Experience at startups, ideally on a founding team or early stage
Familiarity with clinical trial workflows, EMR data, or regulatory processes
Experience building internal tools or automation for operations teams

Responsibilities

Embed with Study Delivery to deeply understand how studies are created, launched, and run, becoming the technical expert who knows both the platform and the operational workflows
Identify and implement AI-powered automation for repetitive, manual processes, using our in-house AI capabilities as well as off-the-shelf LLMs
Ship product features in our operator portal, solving real problems you've observed firsthand while embedded with the team
Create tooling and scripts that solve immediate operational pain points, whether that's a Retool dashboard or a lightweight one-off AI agent
Enable non-engineering teams to adopt AI tools in their own workflows, from setting up AI-assisted coding environments to training teams on new capabilities
Act as the connective tissue between Study Delivery and the broader engineering and product organization , surfacing the highest-impact problems and ensuring that roadmaps reflect real operational needs