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Founding AI Engineer

 

Location: Remote (Chicago, IL preferred)

Compensation: 9% equity stake

💡 The Market Need

The role of the staffing office in a hospital or health system is to help operations fill staffing gaps to meet patient demand. Staffing is more than just a function of what's happening in that department; it needs to consider the bottlenecks and throughput from the rest of the hospital to determine the optimal staffing needs, then ensure there are appropriate resources available to fill those gaps. Today, these needs are unmet because of suboptimal staffing configurations, barriers to interpretation and access to the relevant data needed to make the optimal decision, and decentralized management of staffing protocols and tools.

🚀 About the Company

✅ We've built a pipeline of over 15 pilot customers, with 3 of them in conversation about an operating partnership.

✅ We've recruited 2 ex-hospital-CEOs to our Advisory Board

✅ Our founders have a strong track record of 15+ years in healthcare operations, building healthcare startups (2 successful exists to date), and a passion to make an impact on the way hospitals operate today.

💼 About the Role

We're looking for a talented and experienced founding AI engineer to join the HIRA team. You'll play a key role in furthering our MVP to make it plug-and-play ready for live operating environments while using your technical expertise to design, develop, and deploy intelligent solutions that take action where our customers identify challenges in decision making for optimal labor management.

The team isn’t looking for a specialist or a silent executor. We're looking for a builder, someone who can partner with the co-founders, make technical decisions early, and build something durable.

This isn’t about waiting on specs. You’ll be working directly with the co-founders and customers to figure out what gets built and how. That includes:

  • Enhancing the first version of the product 
  • Choosing the stack and setting up core infrastructure
  • Developing backend and frontend systems for launch
  • Integrating LLMs and agentic workflows into the product
  • Laying the technical groundwork for future hires and scale

🔧 Core Responsibilities

✅ Own the AI Pipeline: Take end-to-end ownership of the AI lifecycle — from data collection and preprocessing to model training, evaluation, and deployment.

✅ Experiment and Iterate: Rapidly prototype and experiment with different models and approaches (e.g., anomaly detection, root cause analysis, LLM-based insights) to find what works best.

✅ Set the Technical Direction: As an early technical hire, contribute to foundational architecture decisions and establish best practices for AI/ML within the company.

✅ Ensure Reliability and Scalability: Build systems that perform reliably at scale and integrate safely into production environments.

✅ Stay Ahead of the Curve: Keep up with the latest advancements in AI/ML and observability to help shape our product roadmap.

🏃‍♂️ What You’ll Accomplish

  • 🧪 MVP Build – Enhance the working prototype to be used by early hospital partners
  • 🏗️ Solution Architecture – Design a modular and secure architecture across frontend, backend, and data systems
  • 🗺️ Roadmap Management – Define and iterate the technical roadmap using feedback from customer journey reviews
  • 💰 Technical Investment Forecast – Build a cost-conscious plan for scaling infrastructure, services, and team

➕ Qualifications

  • Engineers with experience building AI products (side-projects count).
  • Solid software engineering skills: Proficiency in Python and TypeScript.
  • Owner mindset: Comfortable working in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment with limited structure and high ownership.

🧰 Your Toolkit (examples, not strict requirements)

  • Causal inference tools: DoWhy, EconML, Pyro
  • LLM frameworks and vector DBs: LangChain, LlamaIndex, Weaviate
  • Dev stack: Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Docker, GitHub
  • Deployment: Azure preferred; open to AWS/GCP
  • Data wrangling: Pandas, NetworkX, SimPy
  • Strong computer science fundamentals, including experience writing unit tests
  • Healthcare experience or strong curiosity about hospital operations

🎯 Who You Are

You’re excited by zero-to-one product challenges. You’re as comfortable exploring abstract inference models as you are spinning up backend infrastructure. You think deeply, move quickly, and thrive with ownership. You may not be a "healthcare person" — yet — but you’re mission-driven, and want your work to matter.

📬 How to Apply

Send your GitHub, LinkedIn, and a short intro to hpatel@vikarahs.com. Let us know what excites you about this opportunity and how you’d approach the role (Subject Line: Founding AI Engineer - [YOUR NAME])