Founding Member of Technical Staff
clera
📍 Remote🌐 Remote💰 $150K–$200K/yr🕐 1mo ago🔗 himalayas
Job Description
### About the Role
This is a founding engineering role at an early-stage **healthtech / safety-critical AI** startup building evidence infrastructure for AI model validation in medical diagnostics. As a Founding Member of Technical Staff, you will help shape the core reasoning methodology that underpins how AI safety claims are investigated, structured, and validated — across the full product lifecycle. You'll work directly alongside the founding team, contributing across technical domains and helping lay the infrastructure for the future of safety-critical AI.
### What You'll Do
* Design and execute investigations into how AI models perform and fail across real-world scenarios.
* Analyze input data, model outputs, and internal representations to evaluate data quality, generalization limits, distribution shift, subgroup performance, and demographic bias.
* Surface failure modes and produce structured evidence that supports, challenges, or refines claims about model performance and safety.
* Develop and evolve the company's evidence methodology — defining how claims, arguments, and evidence should be structured for rigorous AI validation.
* Pressure-test assumptions, critique weak argument structures, and systematize repeated investigations into reusable methods, workflows, and platform primitives.
* Write production-quality Python, build agentic workflows for evidence investigation, and prototype front-end features using AI tooling.
* Contribute beyond your immediate technical domain — this is a founding role that requires ownership, versatility, and the willingness to challenge assumptions.
### What We're Looking For
### Required:
* Degree in CS, mathematics, physics, engineering, or a related quantitative field — or equivalent demonstrated depth.
* Strong ML, statistics, and data science fundamentals; ability to understand the math behind methods, identify broken assumptions, and reason about trade-offs.
* Expert Python skills, spanning raw data analysis through to platform-level code others will rely on.
* Strong engineering judgment on code structure, interface boundaries, and reusability trade-offs.
* Demonstrated ability to operate as a founding-team-caliber contributor — taking end-to-end ownership and contributing across domains.
* Strong cross-functional communication skills; able to present evidence, claims, and validation results to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
* Comfort using AI tooling as a primary mode of working.
* Authorized to work in the United States without visa sponsorship; able to work on-site in Sunnyvale, CA.
### Nice to Have:
* 3–5 years of professional ML experience, or a PhD in model evaluation, robustness, out-of-distribution detection, interpretability, or a related area.
* Experience with AI/ML medical device submissions, FDA review processes, or other regulated environments (e.g., FDA 510(k), De Novo, EU AI Act).
* Background in safety case methodology in aviation, automotive, healthcare, or other safety-critical fields.
### Compensation & Benefits
* **Salary:** $150,000 – $200,000 USD annually
* Founding team equity and early-stage upside
### Location
On-site in **Sunnyvale, CA, United States**. This is a full-time, in-office role. Visa sponsorship is **not available** — candidates must be authorized to work in the US without sponsorship.
Originally posted on [Himalayas](https://himalayas.app)