Director of Engineering

Location: Palo Alto, CA (Onsite, 5 days a week)

Team: Engineering

Partner: A pioneering company building a safety-focused Large Language Model designed specifically for healthcare.

About Our Hiring Partner

Our hiring partner is on a foundational mission to redefine global health through artificial intelligence. They are developing the industry's first safety-focused Large Language Model for healthcare, with the goal of making deep medical expertise universally accessible. This technology represents a generational leap, with the unique potential to dramatically improve health outcomes and equity on a worldwide scale.

Founded by a coalition of visionary leaders—including CEO Munjal Shah, esteemed physicians, hospital administrators, and top AI researchers from institutions like Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Google, and NVIDIA—the company is built on a bedrock of expertise. With $278 million in funding from premier investors like Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst, they possess the strategic backing and resources to execute their ambitious, long-term vision. This is a defining opportunity for engineering leaders seeking startup jobs in SFC that offer both profound impact and technical depth.

Why This Role is a Landmark Opportunity

1. Lead with Purpose: Move beyond traditional tech and build products that have a direct, positive impact on human health and clinical outcomes.
2. Build and Inspire: Recruit, mentor, and lead a world-class team of AI engineers, shaping both technology and talent from the ground up.
3. Architect the Future: Translate cutting-edge AI research into production-grade systems, defining the technical roadmap for next-generation agentic AI in healthcare.
4. Execute with Substance: Join a well-capitalized, high-growth environment where you can focus on building with stability and scale—a key advantage for leadership roles in startup jobs in SFC.

About the Role

As a Director of Engineering, you will be the critical force that brings frontier AI research to life, launching transformative healthcare products powered by generative, voice-based agents. You will operate at the intersection of AI research, engineering, and product, leading the design and delivery of intelligent, adaptive, and clinically compliant agentic systems.

This is a strategic and hands-on leadership role. You will be responsible for architecting scalable systems, establishing engineering excellence, and building a high-performing team dedicated to delivering clinically safe, production-grade systems used by healthcare professionals and patients globally.

What You'll Do

1. Team Building & Leadership: Recruit, grow, and inspire a world-class AI engineering team. Foster a culture of innovation, accountability, and technical excellence while mentoring engineers and managers for high performance and career growth.
2. Product Development & Delivery: Lead the end-to-end design, implementation, and deployment of new agentic features, such as reasoning loops, contextual memory, and adaptive dialogue systems. Partner with Product, Clinical, and Research teams to translate complex designs into reliable, production-ready solutions.
3. Technical Strategy & Execution: Define and communicate the technical roadmap for agentic AI systems. Establish robust, scalable architectures, coding standards, and operational best practices to ensure the delivery of safe, performant systems.
4. Operational Excellence: Drive sprint planning, technical reviews, and release processes. Ensure superior system uptime, observability, and reliability. Manage engineering budgets, staffing, and key vendor relationships.

Qualifications (Must-Have)

1. 10+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 5+ years in engineering management with responsibility for team growth and performance.
2. A proven track record of building and scaling high-caliber technical teams from the ground up.
3. Deep understanding of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure), and modern ML/AI pipelines.
4. Experience developing and launching AI-driven or conversational products, ideally within regulated domains such as healthcare or finance.
5. Strong architectural skills and the ability to be hands-on with code and system design when necessary.
6. Exceptional communication and cross-functional leadership skills, with a passion for healthcare innovation and responsible AI development.

Bonus Qualifications (Nice-to-Have)

1. Direct experience with agentic AI systems, LLM orchestration frameworks, or safety-aligned AI.
2. Familiarity with healthcare interoperability standards like FHIR and HL7.
3. Background in managing compliance for regulated products (e.g., HIPAA, SOC 2, FDA SaMD).

This is a full-time, onsite role based in Palo Alto, CA. The company culture is built on the power of in-person collaboration to accelerate innovation and build a cohesive, high-performing team.

Apply Now

If you are an engineering leader driven by the challenge of turning AI breakthroughs into real-world products that improve and save lives, we strongly encourage you to apply. This role stands out among startup jobs in SFC as a chance to lead at the frontier of AI and leave a lasting legacy on the future of healthcare.