Principal Machine Learning Engineer, Recommendations

Vumedi Inc. • Oakland, CA

7d

About The Position

Vumedi is hiring a Principal Machine Learning Engineer to lead the architecture and development of its AI-powered discovery platform. The role will shape how physicians discover medical knowledge through intelligent retrieval, semantic search, personalized recommendations, and large language model-powered experiences. Working directly with the CTO, the engineer will influence technical strategy and implementation, evaluate emerging AI technologies, and design production systems that deliver relevant educational content at scale.

The position owns the technical direction for Vumedi’s next-generation discovery platform. It combines principal-level architectural leadership with hands-on building, including experimentation, architectural design, and production coding. The engineer will collaborate with Product, Data Science, and Engineering to prototype, iterate on, and launch AI capabilities, while defining the long-term architecture for AI across the platform.

Vumedi describes medical education as a challenging retrieval problem involving specialized content, complex user intent, clinical context, evolving medical knowledge, and high expectations for relevance and trust. The work is intended to help physicians find information that supports better patient care. The role partners closely with technical leadership and engineering colleagues across Vumedi’s Oakland headquarters and Zagreb engineering office.

Requirements

• Experience building intelligent discovery systems at scale, such as recommendation systems, search relevance and ranking, semantic search, RAG, vector search and embeddings, knowledge retrieval systems, personalized content discovery, or AI-powered user experiences.
• Production experience building LLM-powered applications.
• Experience with retrieval pipelines, embeddings, and vector databases.
• Experience with modern AI frameworks and orchestration tools.
• Experience with distributed systems operating at meaningful scale.
• Experience with cloud-native architectures.
• Experience with Python and modern backend development.
• Experience with experimentation, evaluation, and iterative model improvement.
• Ability to solve difficult discovery and AI problems; familiarity with every technology currently used by Vumedi is not required.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with products involving content recommendations, marketplace ranking, search infrastructure, feed ranking, personalized discovery, knowledge graphs, enterprise search, or AI assistants.
• Experience with multiple areas among production LLM applications, retrieval pipelines, embeddings, vector databases, modern AI frameworks and orchestration tools, distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, Python, modern backend development, and iterative model improvement.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture and development of Vumedi’s AI-powered discovery platform.
• Design personalized recommendation systems for physicians’ educational content.
• Build LLM-powered discovery experiences that understand clinical intent beyond keywords.
• Develop semantic search, retrieval, ranking, and recommendation pipelines using embeddings, vector search, and modern retrieval architectures.
• Design production-grade knowledge graph RAG systems combining medical knowledge with generative AI.
• Evaluate and implement emerging AI technologies, frameworks, and infrastructure.
• Build scalable inference and retrieval services for physicians around the world.
• Partner with Product, Data Science, and Engineering to prototype, iterate on, and launch AI capabilities.
• Define the long-term technical architecture for AI across the Vumedi platform.
• Contribute hands-on through experimentation and production code as well as architecture and technical design.

Benefits

• Work on problems intended to help physicians learn and improve patient outcomes worldwide.
• Shape an AI discovery platform from the ground up.
• Work directly with the CTO and engineering leaders on architecture and product strategy.
• Own meaningful technical decisions across retrieval architecture, recommendation systems, and AI infrastructure.
• Join a collaborative engineering culture with engineers, product leaders, and data experts across Oakland and Zagreb.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed