Software Engineer, Applied AI (Healthcare)

About us

Orphic Health is an Oxford University spin-out building the evidence-based clinical reasoning platform to make AI safe for healthcare. We combine exclusive access to one of the world's largest clinical guideline repositories with world-class AI research to deliver something auditable, up-to-date, and ready for real clinical workflows.

We're well-funded and generating revenue with large US healthcare enterprise partners. The team brings deep experience across Oxford AI research, McKinsey, Fortune 200 health tech, and major payer/provider systems, and practising MDs.

The role

We are seeking an AI/Software Engineer to work on frontier systems in clinical AI. This is a hands-on role for exceptional mid- or senior-level engineers with real technical depth, with top equity and compensation to match. You will work directly with founders, clinicians, and Oxford AI researchers, and take novel methods to live deployment with major US healthcare organisations. We work on a hybrid basis, in Oxford or London.

What you'll do:

Ship frontier clinical AI into production - owning systems end-to-end, from research bench to live deployments running at enterprise scale. Depending on your expertise, you can expect to:

• Work closely with clinicians and AI researchers to turn requirements into concrete AI strategy
• Build the ingestion pipeline for proprietary clinical guidelines and tens of millions of items of clinical literature
• Build performant, state-of-the-art retrieval systems over a unique clinical corpus
• Build evaluations for high-stakes AI tasks - synthetic data, human-in-the-loop pipelines, and rigorous clinical evals
• Train, fine-tune, and post-train models (SFT, RLHF, RLAIF, reward modelling) to push performance on clinical reasoning, retrieval, and grounding tasks where off-the-shelf models fall short
• Productionise AI services with regards to scalability, cost/latency optimisation, and monitoring
• Partner with researchers to take novel methods from paper to production

You should have:

• Strong software engineering skills & knowledge of best practices
• 3+ years building production systems, including Python and cloud fluency
• Experience shipping language model-based products to real users in a production environment
• Experience in start-ups or 0 -> 1 projects, requiring ownership under ambiguity
• Expertise in search, IR, RAG, or NLP

Bonus expertise:

• AI in regulated or high-stakes environments (healthcare, finance, law)
• Biomedical, clinical, or scientific NLP
• Healthcare data standards (EHR, FHIR, SNOMED, ICD, RxNorm)
• Advanced RAG: knowledge graphs, hierarchical retrieval, reasoning-augmented retrieval, citation grounding, or agentic retrieval
• Agentic systems: multi-agent, reasoning, tool-use, memory, MCP
• Safety: uncertainty/OOD detection, calibration, abstention, red-teaming
• Document ingestion: PDF/HTML parsing, OCR, metadata extraction, and content versioning
• Data engineering: pipeline architecture, ETL/ELT, data validation and quality monitoring
• Language model training, fine-tuning, distillation, or reinforcement learning
• Evaluation design
• Model hosting and inference
• Full-stack experience
• Building or leading technical teams
• MSc/PhD, or publications in relevant fields

Working at Orphic Health:

• Top-tier compensation, equity, and benefits.
• Hybrid working from Oxford or London.
• No visa sponsorship at this time.