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About This Role
About the Role
Frontier models are only as good as the data they learn from. At Hippocratic AI, that data decides whether an AI agent safely guides a patient through a medication change at 2 a.m.
Our data powers Polaris, a constellation of models with a 700B-parameter core and specialized safety supervisors. In our evaluations, Polaris reaches 99.95% accuracy on drug-safety benchmarks versus 87.9% for the closest voice-deployable frontier model. The labeling, evals, and rater calibration behind it are how we earn and defend numbers like that.
We’re hiring a Technical Program Manager to run the human-in-the-loop data labeling engine behind our frontier healthcare AI. That spans audio and conversation annotation, clinician-labeled training data, preference and RLHF data, and the evaluations that decide what ships. You’ll work daily with ML researchers, applied scientists, and licensed clinicians. The data you produce feeds directly into our model training and evaluation loops.
What You’ll Do
- Run the data pipelines behind our models. Own end-to-end delivery of labeling and annotation programs, including audio and voice-conversation labeling, supervised labeling, and preference and RLHF data. You’ll manage scoping, task design, execution, QA, and delivery against live model-development cycles.
- Turn evals into products. Work with ML and Applied Science to turn evaluation and training-signal needs into concrete labeling tasks, rubrics, and success criteria. Your evals become the benchmarks that gate releases.
- Build and scale an expert rater workforce. Source, screen, and onboard clinicians and specialized raters through marketplaces, vendors, and in-house teams. This includes designing qualification tasks, setting rates, and scaling pools up and down as programs change.
- Write the guidelines that shape model behavior. Author and iterate labeling guidelines and annotation rubrics, especially for subjective, high-stakes clinical judgment.
- Engineer data quality at scale. Design QC systems using gold sets, calibration sessions, spot checks, and inter-rater agreement tracking. Catch rater drift and annotation bottlenecks before they reach training.
- Drive velocity and accountability. Track throughput, cost, and quality. Manage vendor relationships (SOWs, performance reviews), choose labeling and QA tooling, and keep Engineering, Clinical, and Infrastructure aligned on dependencies and timelines.
What Success Looks Like
- By Day 90: You own a live data labeling or eval program through a major delivery milestone. You’ve cleared a critical bottleneck in the pipeline and shipped one measurable quality or throughput improvement.
- By 12 months: You run multiple concurrent labeling and eval programs. Your calibrated rater bench is trusted by ML teams, and you can trace model improvements back to the data you delivered.
What You Bring
- 5+ years in technical program management or data operations in an AI/ML or data-intensive environment (3+ years considered for exceptional candidates)
- 2+ years hands-on with data labeling, annotation, or model evaluation, including writing guidelines and managing quality at scale
- Experience sourcing and managing contractor or expert annotator workforces through marketplaces (e.g., Mercor, Upwork, Toloka) or labeling vendors
- Working knowledge of how annotation quality affects model training, including preference data, pairwise comparisons, and rater calibration (RLHF)
- A strong grasp of quality metrics (IAA, precision/recall on gold sets, throughput vs. accuracy tradeoffs)
- A track record of owning critical data or eval projects under time pressure, working with ML engineers and applied scientists, and driving results without direct authority
- Comfort with ambiguity in a fast-moving, healthcare-adjacent AI environment
Nice to Have
- Experience running or supporting RLHF or other training-data pipelines at an AI lab or applied ML team
- Clinical, healthcare, or other regulated, high-stakes data experience
- Familiarity with Label Studio, Scale AI, Surge AI, or SageMaker Ground Truth
- Experience qualifying specialized raters such as clinicians or bilingual SMEs
- Exposure to reward hacking and specification gaming, and how annotation design can mitigate them
Why Join Hippocratic AI
Reinvent healthcare with AI that puts safety first. We’re building the world’s first healthcare‑only, safety‑focused LLM — a breakthrough platform designed to transform patient outcomes at a global scale. This is category creation.
Work with the people shaping the future. Hippocratic AI was co‑founded by CEO Munjal Shah and a team of physicians, hospital leaders, AI pioneers, and researchers from institutions like El Camino Health, Johns Hopkins, Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and NVIDIA.
Backed by the world’s leading healthcare and AI investors. We recently raised a $126M Series C at a $3.5B valuation, led by Avenir Growth, bringing total funding to $404M with participation from CapitalG, General Catalyst, a16z, Kleiner Perkins, Premji Invest, UHS, Cincinnati Children’s, WellSpan Health, John Doerr, Rick Klausner, and others.
Build alongside the best in healthcare and AI. Join experts who’ve spent their careers improving care, advancing science, and building world‑changing technologies — ensuring our platform is powerful, trusted, and truly transformative.
Equal Opportunity
Hippocratic AI is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We are committed to building a team that reflects the patients we serve. We actively encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds. If you require accommodations during the hiring process, please contact [email protected].
Please be aware of recruitment scams impersonating Hippocratic AI. All recruiting communication will come from @**hippocraticai.com email addresses. We will never request payment or sensitive personal information during the hiring process.
Role Details
About This Role
AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.
Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.
Across the 11,520 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 76% of the market. At Hippocratic AI, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
Skills Required
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.
Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $212,040 based on 13,780 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $193,200.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,480. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,000. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($266,050) and AI Engineering Manager ($253,461). By seniority level: Entry: $112,320; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $230,000; Director: $272,250; VP: $235,830.
Hippocratic AI AI Hiring
Hippocratic AI has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in Menlo Park, CA, US.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 6% (708 positions) offer remote work, while 10,737 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (3,257 roles, $221,000 median); San Francisco (2,766 roles, $260,550 median); Los Angeles (1,580 roles, $210,000 median).
Career Path
Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.
The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.
What to Expect in Interviews
Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.
When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 11,520 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 140 entry-level, 5,630 mid-level, 4,176 senior, and 1,574 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (708 positions). The remaining 10,737 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $213,480. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,000. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($266,050 median, 70 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($253,461 median, 58 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 476 roles).
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 11,520 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (8,769), AI Software Engineer (586), AI Product Manager (511). 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 (140) are outnumbered by mid-level (5,630) and senior (4,176) 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 1,574 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (708 positions), with 10,737 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 $213,480. Top-quartile roles start at $264,000, and the 90th percentile reaches $318,400. 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 $266,050 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $140,000. 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 (2,267 postings), Aws (1,178 postings), Azure (972 postings), Rag (924 postings), Gcp (715 postings), Pytorch (586 postings), Claude (572 postings), Kubernetes (559 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
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