Principal Software Engineer, AI Discovery & Recommendations

Vumedi Inc. • Oakland, CA

5d • Hybrid

About The Position

Vumedi is the world's largest video education platform for physicians, trusted by more than 250,000 doctors worldwide to stay current on the latest clinical research, surgical techniques, and medical innovations. Every day, physicians come to Vumedi looking for the right knowledge at the right moment, whether they're preparing for a procedure, researching a rare condition, or learning from experts across thousands of specialties. We're building the next generation of that experience. Our vision is to transform how doctors discover medical knowledge by combining large language models, retrieval systems, semantic search, and personalized recommendations into an intelligent learning platform unlike anything else in healthcare. If you've built recommendation systems, search platforms, ranking algorithms, or AI-powered discovery experiences, we'd love to talk. We're looking for a Principal AI/ML Engineer to lead the architecture and development of Vumedi's AI-powered discovery platform. This isn't about adding an AI feature to an existing product. You'll help define how hundreds of thousands of physicians discover knowledge through intelligent retrieval, semantic search, personalized recommendations, and LLM-powered experiences. Working directly with our CTO, you'll have significant influence over both technical strategy and implementation: from evaluating emerging AI technologies to designing production systems that deliver highly relevant educational content at scale. This is a rare opportunity to apply modern AI techniques to a mission that directly improves patient care around the world.

Requirements

• Experience building intelligent discovery systems at scale.
• Experience building recommendation systems.
• Experience building search relevance and ranking.
• Experience building semantic search.
• Experience with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
• Experience with vector search and embeddings.
• Experience building knowledge retrieval systems.
• Experience with personalized content discovery.
• Experience building 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.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with content recommendations.
• Experience with marketplace ranking.
• Experience with search infrastructure.
• Experience with feed ranking.
• Experience with personalized discovery.
• Experience with knowledge graphs.
• Experience with enterprise search.
• Experience with AI assistants.

Responsibilities

• Designing intelligent recommendation systems that personalize educational content for physicians.
• Building LLM-powered discovery experiences that understand clinical intent and not just keywords.
• Developing semantic search, retrieval, ranking, and recommendation pipelines using embeddings, vector search, and modern retrieval architectures.
• Designing production-grade knowledge graph RAG systems that combine medical knowledge with generative AI.
• Evaluating and implementing emerging AI technologies, frameworks, and infrastructure as the ecosystem rapidly evolves.
• Building scalable inference and retrieval services capable of serving physicians around the world.
• Partnering closely with Product, Data Science, and Engineering to rapidly prototype, iterate, and launch new AI capabilities.
• Defining the long-term technical architecture for AI across the Vumedi platform.
• Moving comfortably between whiteboard discussions, architectural design, experimentation, and production code.

Benefits

• Work on problems that matter: Your work helps physicians learn new procedures, adopt new treatments, and ultimately improve outcomes for patients worldwide.
• Build something from the ground up: You'll shape the future of AI discovery at Vumedi rather than optimizing a small piece of an already mature platform.
• Work directly with technical leadership: Partner closely with our CTO and engineering leaders on long-term architecture and product strategy.
• Own meaningful technical decisions: From retrieval architecture to recommendation systems to AI infrastructure, you'll influence how the platform evolves for years to come.
• Join a collaborative engineering culture: Work alongside engineers, product leaders, and data experts across our Oakland headquarters and engineering office in Zagreb, Croatia.

What This Job Offers

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