Senior Software Engineer, AI Platform

$175K - $230K San Francisco, CA, US Senior AI Software Engineer

Interested in this AI Software Engineer role at Color Health, Inc?

Apply Now →

Skills & Technologies

Prompt EngineeringPythonRagTypescript

About This Role

AI job market dashboard showing open roles by category

Color is revolutionizing cancer care with the nation’s first Virtual Cancer Clinic, delivering high-quality, physician-led multidisciplinary care across all 50 states. Our innovative, guideline-based approach spans cancer screening, risk assessment, prevention, diagnosis, treatment support, and survivorship. In addition to personalized direct medical care, our services include cancer genetics risk assessment, nutrition, mental health support and at-home cancer screening diagnostics. Using technology-driven, patient-centric solutions, Color is transforming how employers, unions, health plans, and governments address cancer. Color’s goal is to close critical cancer care gaps, improve cancer outcomes, and guide patients with empathy through their healthcare journeys.

The Team:

The AI Platform Team explores how rapidly evolving AI capabilities can create meaningful impact for patients, clinicians, and Color teams. We are a small, highly collaborative, cross-functional team of engineers, product managers, designers, and clinical partners. We build AI applications, experiment with emerging models, tools, techniques and interaction patterns, and turn what works into durable patterns and capabilities that can be used across Color.

We embrace rapid experimentation, learning quickly from new technologies and real-world use, and bringing the most promising ideas into production. Given the pace at which AI is advancing, our goal is not simply to adopt the latest AI technology, but to identify where it creates meaningful value in cancer care and deliver AI experiences that are safe, reliable, and impactful.

The Role:

We’re hiring a full-stack Senior Software Engineer to build AI products and the platform that powers them across Color.

This new role will report to the Senior Director of AI Platform and work across the stack - from intuitive clinician and patient-facing AI experiences to the backend services and infrastructure that power them. This is a full-stack role and we’re looking for candidates with senior level experience across frontend, backend and systems engineering.

We seek a hands-on builder with strong product instincts and deep curiosity about AI. You should be someone who experiments constantly, follows advancements in models and tooling, and translates emerging capabilities into reliable products. You will also raise Color’s AI fluency by sharing insights and demonstrating effective building patterns.

How You’ll Contribute:

  • Build full-stack AI applications for Color’s care teams and patients, owning features from user experience through backend services, AI orchestration, data access, and production deployment.
  • Explore where emerging AI capabilities can meaningfully improve cancer care and how Color works, moving rapidly from ideas to prototypes to shipped experiences.
  • Experiment rapidly with emerging AI capabilities, turning promising models, tools, and techniques into prototypes and incrementally evolving the best ideas into production systems.
  • Develop reliable LLM-powered systems, including retrieval and knowledge systems, citations and grounding, prompt management, structured outputs, tool use, agentic workflows, and evaluation.
  • Develop the evaluation, observability, and safety practices needed to understand AI quality, compare approaches, identify regressions, and confidently evolve successful experiments into durable products.
  • Design privacy- and security-conscious systems appropriate for sensitive healthcare data and clinical workflows.
  • Partner closely with product, design, clinical, and engineering teams to understand problems, prototype solutions, learn from users, and ship improvements quickly.
  • Raise Color’s AI fluency by sharing experiments, emerging techniques, lessons learned, and strong patterns for building with AI across the company.
  • Mentor others and raise the technical and product quality bar.

Possible Projects To Contribute To:

  • Healthbook: Build and evolve an internal AI application that helps our care and clinical teams understand patients’ longitudinal health histories, synthesize records, answer grounded questions with citations, and draft documents using an AI agent.
  • AI Platform: Build shared capabilities that enable teams across Color to develop reliable AI applications quickly, including knowledge bases and retrieval, citations and grounding, prompt management, evaluation, observability, and reusable agentic patterns.
  • What’s next: Explore the next generation of patient-facing AI experiences, and turn what we learn into platform capabilities that enable teams across Color to build with AI.

Our Ideal Candidate Will Have:

  • 5+ years of experience building and shipping production software, with strong full-stack skills across React/TypeScript, Python, APIs, data integrations, and cloud infrastructure.
  • Hands-on experience building production AI products with modern LLMs, including patterns such as RAG, structured outputs, tool calling, agentic workflows, prompt engineering, and model evaluation.
  • Experience turning complex, heterogeneous data into useful product experiences and taking systems from prototype through production, including testing, monitoring, and iteration.
  • Strong product judgment and the ability to balance speed, technical quality, reliability, and user impact in ambiguous, rapidly evolving environments.
  • A bias toward tinkering, rapid experimentation, and learning. You start small, prototype quickly, measure what works, and recognize when new AI capabilities create opportunities for a larger leap.
  • An informed point of view on how AI is changing software engineering and product development. You regularly experiment with new models, frameworks, coding tools, agent architectures, and interaction patterns—and communicate what you learn. You are someone others at Color look to for what’s new in AI, what works in practice, and how we should apply it.

Nice to Have:

  • Experience building AI platforms or shared infrastructure that empowered multiple teams to ship AI applications.
  • Experience developing healthcare technology involving sensitive clinical data.

We believe that all people are capable of great things. We encourage you to apply even if you do not meet all of the requirements that are listed within this job description.

What We Offer:

  • Competitive salary
  • ✨ Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life, and disability benefits
  • 401k match
  • Monthly phone and wifi stipend for employees, annual ergonomic stipend
  • Generous vacation policy, paid holidays and company-wide recharge days
  • Equal paid parental leave for birthing and non-birthing parents
  • Free cancer screening and prevention resources for employees and their adult dependents

Base Salary Range: $175,000 - $230,000

The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: work experience, market data, skills, geographic location, and business need. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role may also be eligible for equity and benefits.

Color prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type and affords equal employment opportunities to employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Color conforms to the spirit as well as to the letter of all applicable laws and regulations. We are also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified applicants with disabilities in our recruitment process.

Salary Context

This $175K-$230K range is above the median for AI Software Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $192K across 146 roles with salary data).

Role Details

Title Senior Software Engineer, AI Platform
Location San Francisco, CA, US
Category AI Software Engineer
Experience Senior
Salary $175K - $230K
Remote No

About This Role

AI Software Engineers build the applications and systems that AI models run inside. They own the API layers, data pipelines, frontend integrations, and infrastructure that turn a model into a product users interact with. Every AI company needs engineers who can build the software around the AI.

The challenge is building reliable systems around inherently unreliable components. Models are probabilistic. They'll give different answers to the same question. They hallucinate. They're slow. They're expensive. Your job is to build an application layer that handles all of this gracefully while delivering a product that users trust and enjoy.

Across the 8,943 AI roles we're tracking, AI Software Engineer positions make up 4% of the market. At Color Health, Inc, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.

AI Software Engineer roles are among the most numerous in the AI job market. Every company deploying AI needs software engineers who understand AI integration patterns. The demand is broad, spanning startups to enterprises, across every industry adopting AI capabilities.

What the Work Looks Like

A typical week includes: building API endpoints that serve model inference with caching and fallback logic, designing the data pipeline that feeds context to a RAG system, implementing streaming responses in the frontend, debugging a race condition in the async inference pipeline, and optimizing database queries for the vector search layer. It's full-stack engineering with AI at the center.

AI Software Engineer roles are among the most numerous in the AI job market. Every company deploying AI needs software engineers who understand AI integration patterns. The demand is broad, spanning startups to enterprises, across every industry adopting AI capabilities.

Skills Required

Prompt Engineering (4% of roles) Python (16% of roles) Rag (6% of roles) Typescript (2% of roles)

Full-stack engineering skills with AI integration experience. Python and TypeScript are the most common requirements. You'll need to understand API design, database architecture, and how to build reliable systems around probabilistic outputs. Experience with streaming, async processing, and caching patterns is increasingly important as real-time AI applications proliferate.

Knowledge of vector databases, embedding APIs, and LLM integration patterns (function calling, structured outputs, retry logic) differentiates AI software engineers from general software engineers. Understanding cost optimization (caching strategies, model routing, batched inference) is valuable since inference costs can dominate application economics.

Strong postings describe the product you'll be building, the AI integration patterns you'll work with, and the scale requirements. Look for companies that have existing AI features and need engineers to improve and expand them, not companies that are 'planning to add AI' someday.

Compensation Benchmarks

AI Software Engineer roles pay a median of $220,000 based on 1,448 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $228,700. This role's midpoint ($202K) sits 8% below the category median. Disclosed range: $175K to $230K.

Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,380. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,148. The 90th percentile reaches $319,310. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($253,100) and Research Engineer ($252,000). By seniority level: Entry: $110,408; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $228,700; Director: $272,250; VP: $235,000.

Color Health, Inc AI Hiring

Color Health, Inc has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI Software Engineer. Based in San Francisco, CA, US. Compensation range: $230K - $230K.

Location Context

AI roles in San Francisco pay a median of $263,811 across 2,416 tracked positions. That's 24% above the national median.

Career Path

Common paths into AI Software Engineer roles include Software Engineer, Full-Stack Developer, Backend Engineer.

From here, career progression typically leads toward Staff Engineer, AI Architect, Engineering Manager.

If you're a software engineer, you're already 80% there. Learn the AI integration patterns: RAG, streaming inference, function calling, structured outputs. Build a project that demonstrates you can wrap an AI model in a production-quality application with proper error handling, caching, and user experience. That's the portfolio piece that gets you hired.

What to Expect in Interviews

Technical screens look like standard software engineering interviews with an AI twist. Expect system design questions about building reliable applications around probabilistic models: handling streaming responses, implementing retry logic for API failures, and designing caching strategies for LLM outputs. Coding rounds test standard algorithms plus practical integration patterns like async processing and rate limiting.

When evaluating opportunities: Strong postings describe the product you'll be building, the AI integration patterns you'll work with, and the scale requirements. Look for companies that have existing AI features and need engineers to improve and expand them, not companies that are 'planning to add AI' someday.

AI Hiring Overview

The AI job market has 8,943 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 175 entry-level, 4,132 mid-level, 3,268 senior, and 1,368 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (521 positions). The remaining 8,351 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.

The market median for AI roles is $213,380. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,148. The 90th percentile reaches $319,310. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($253,100 median, 57 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 419 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($251,622 median, 51 roles).

AI Software Engineer roles are among the most numerous in the AI job market. Every company deploying AI needs software engineers who understand AI integration patterns. The demand is broad, spanning startups to enterprises, across every industry adopting AI capabilities.

The AI Job Market Today

The AI job market spans 8,943 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (6,739), AI Product Manager (403), AI Software Engineer (402). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.

The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (175) are outnumbered by mid-level (4,132) and senior (3,268) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 1,368 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.

Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (521 positions), with 8,351 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.

AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $213,380. Top-quartile roles start at $264,148, and the 90th percentile reaches $319,310. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.

Category matters for compensation. AI Safety roles lead at $253,100 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $141,440. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.

The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,422 postings), Aws (808 postings), Azure (638 postings), Rag (555 postings), Gcp (457 postings), Pytorch (433 postings), Claude (341 postings), Kubernetes (337 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.

Frequently Asked Questions

Based on 1,448 roles with disclosed compensation, the median salary for AI Software Engineer positions is $220,000. Actual compensation varies by seniority, location, and company stage.
Full-stack engineering skills with AI integration experience. Python and TypeScript are the most common requirements. You'll need to understand API design, database architecture, and how to build reliable systems around probabilistic outputs. Experience with streaming, async processing, and caching patterns is increasingly important as real-time AI applications proliferate.
About 6% of the 8,943 AI roles we track offer remote work. Remote availability varies by company and seniority level, with senior and leadership roles more likely to offer location flexibility.
Color Health, Inc is among the companies actively hiring for AI and ML talent. Check our company profiles for detailed breakdowns of open roles, salary ranges, and hiring trends.
Common next steps from AI Software Engineer positions include Staff Engineer, AI Architect, Engineering Manager. Progression depends on whether you lean toward technical depth, people management, or product strategy.

Get Weekly AI Career Intelligence

Salary data, skills demand, and market signals from 16,000+ AI job postings. Every Monday.