Founding Engineer, Applied Research

We are looking for a Research Engineer with 3+ years of experience to advance the core clinical intelligence capabilities of our product. You'll take ambiguous research problems in healthcare AI, bound them, solve them, and deploy them into production: working across evals, model fine-tuning, agentic systems, and browser/computer use models. This is an applied research role at a seed-stage company backed by a16z and Lightspeed that is building the clinical AI layer for healthcare payments. If you're excited about making models drive real-world impact in an industry that desperately needs innovation, this is the place to do it.

What will you be doing?

Building clinical evals to measure and improve model performance across chart understanding, claims review, authorization logic, denial analysis, and payer policy interpretation

Improving Backbone's core intelligence through prompting, fine-tuning, retrieval, structured reasoning, and evaluation of language models on real clinical and financial data

Building and improving agentic browser-use and computer-use models to navigate payer portals, EHRs, and complex healthcare software

Translating product feedback from live provider and payer workflows into bounded research problems, then deploying solutions into production

Partnering with backend and forward-deployed engineers to productionize research improvements at high velocity