AI Engineer (Health Tech Start-up) 🚀 in GREATER CHICAGO AREA

About 1Phi 🤩

1Phi is building a first of its kind AI-powered healthcare navigator, called 1Sage, that lets patients find the treatment options with the best clinical outcomes for their unique situation. It continuously monitors and trains on billions of medical records across over 100 million patients nationwide and over 1 million doctors and medical facilities. Patients simply chat with 1Sage, indicating their circumstances and needs. The more information they provide, the better the insights.

1Phi stands for 1st Principles Healthcare Institute, a name that reflects our commitment to R&D and taking an unorthodox approach to solving intractable and persistent industry challenges. As a Public Benefit Corporation, we’re grounded in decades of experience with payer financial models, government policy, provider incentives, and patient empowerment. By deploying artificial intelligence across data assets previously available only to industry insiders, 1Phi is uniquely positioned to bring patients the knowledge to make decisions in their own best interest.

You would be joining an early stage startup team of engineers, healthcare experts and dreamers. You’ll help define the culture, the tech stack, and the future of our industry. Tight-knit team. Zero bureaucracy. Project ownership. Room to experiment. Accelerated growth.

Requirements 🤓

What You’ll Do

• Train and deploy NLP + predictive models on physician + clinical data.
• Build evaluation frameworks to ensure fairness, accuracy, and trust.
• Own workflow automation pipelines for healthcare use cases.
• Implement agentic design patterns, including:
• Agent orchestration.
• Human-in-the-loop review + escalation.
• Evaluation loops for reliability.
• Generate and stream LLM responses (text + voice) to the FSD.
• Work closely with the Data Engineer to:
• Data model ML result sets so they can be queried efficiently.
• Ensure query and retrieval speed supports real-time streaming voice/text user experiences.
• Experiment with LLMs, vector DBs, and retrieval-augmented generation.
• Translate cutting-edge research into practical, production-ready tools.

You're a fit if:

• 2+ years building ML models beyond academia.
• Strong Python skills with TensorFlow, PyTorch, or Hugging Face.
• Experience deploying models to production in the cloud (AWS SageMaker, GCP Vertex, or Azure ML).
• Familiar with LLMs, RAG, and vector DBs.
• Skilled in workflow automation and agentic system design.
• Comfortable moving fast, experimenting, and iterating.
• Strong collaboration skills with Data Engineers to optimize resultset modeling and fast query performance.

Nice to Have:

• LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, Autogen, or similar frameworks.
• Healthcare data experience.
• Familiarity with ML Ops tooling and monitoring.
• Interest in multimodal (voice, text, UI) interaction design.

Hybrid Work Environment 🏡

We are still in the process of defining the optimal mix of in person vs remote. On one hand, we appreciate the focus time and convenience of remote work. On the other, we realize that solving difficult problems benefits from rolling up your sleeves in the same room.

We might end up finding that 2-3 days per week in person works great. Or that longer stretches less frequently are better. That said, we are focusing on hiring in Chicago, so that we have flexibility to evolve the hybrid work environment as our team grows.

Hiring Process 😎

At 1Phi, we believe hiring should be fair, transparent, and collaborative. We work hard to find the best mix of respecting the candidates time, while also giving our team an efficient way to learn if a candidate is a good fit. Since we also strive to simulate the work environment throughout the process, we encourage you to use all the AI/LLM tools and outside resources at your disposal. During the process, if you ever feel that you are being asked for an onerous amount of work, please do not proceed. The best candidates are those who enjoy the process, regardless of the outcome. For candidates who respond quickly, we aim to have the process completed within a couple weeks.

Here’s the entire process: Apply with email → Async discussion (30 mins) → Skills challenge (1-3 hrs) → Interviews (2 hours) → Meet the Team Day and micro-project (1 day) → Offer → Trial period (1-3 weeks)

Benefits 🤑

• Health insurance, dental insurance, and vision insurance
• Generous vacation policy + company holidays
• 401K + profit share contributions
• Quarterly individual performance bonus (~10% at start, ~20% after 4 years)
• Company offsite retreats
• The compensation range for this role is $90,000- $130,000, depending on experience and skill level

How to Apply 😇

Send us your resume and any relevant links (LinkedIn, GitHub, portfolio site, etc.) to careers+linkedin@1phi.com with the subject: “AI Engineer”. Include a description of your most successful project, pointing out how it demonstrates your abilities and resourcefulness in terms of this job description. Indicate whether you need visa sponsorship. (We can sponsor existing H1B holders only.)