AI Engineer
$150,000 - $350,000/year
14 Jan 2025
San Francisco, CA, USA
Verified by Turrior
Content + Source + Freshness • 18 Dec 2025 • 95% confidence
88 / 100
Offer value
Strong opportunity driven by the company's elite leadership, significant funding, and impact on life sciences.
- Significant impact on life sciences through AI
- Competitive salary up to $350,000
- Flexible and impactful role in a growing startup
Pros
- High potential impact on life-saving innovations
- Competitive salary range ($150,000–$350,000)
- Chance to shape product and engineering culture
Cons
- High-pressure environment typical of startups
- Ambiguity in role and responsibilities
- Possibility of extended work hours
Who it's for
Mid-level to Senior • On-site
Good fit
- AI Engineers with production experience
- Tech-savvy professionals passionate about healthcare
- Individuals looking to innovate in a startup context
Not recommended for
- Entry-level candidates without relevant experience
- Candidates who prefer highly structured corporate roles
- Those seeking only remote working options
Motivation fit
Desire to work at the intersection of AI and healthcareInterest in developing impactful productsReadiness to take ownership in a startup setting
Key skills
Machine learning and AI model deploymentNLP applications and reliability checksCollaboration across multidisciplinary teams
Score: 88/100 AI verified analysis
About the job
About Collate
Collate is an AI document generation platform for life sciences. We automate paperwork with AI, helping our customers get life-saving innovations to patients years faster. Collate is an end-to-end solution, powering every step of drug, diagnostic, and medical device development—from concept to market.
Our CEO Surbhi Sarna is a former General Partner at Y Combinator. Surbhi founded nVision Medical, which developed a new method to detect ovarian cancer and was acquired by Boston Scientific. Our CTO Nate Smith is a former Visiting Partner at Y Combinator and founder of Lever. Our AI researchers, engineers, and designers have worked at Google, Nvidia, Meta, Netflix, Amazon, AirBnB, Hippocratic AI, and Grail, and 40% of our team are former founders.
We’re a small, elite team, with over $30M in seed funding from top investors (Redpoint, First Round Capital, Conviction, and Y Combinator) and leaders in healthcare and AI. This is a rare chance to join at the ground floor of a company with world-changing potential, experienced founders, and resources to execute at scale.
About the Role
We’re looking for an AI Engineer to help build and productionize the models and systems that power Collate’s products. You’ll work at the intersection of machine learning, software engineering, and product — turning cutting-edge research into reliable, user-facing capabilities.
This is an opportunity to shape how advanced AI is applied in Life sciences — a space where performance, safety, and trust matter as much as innovation. As one of the first AI-focused engineers at Collate, you’ll define the standards for how we evaluate, and deploy models that directly impact drug and medical device development.
What You’ll Do
- Prompt optimization, red-teaming, and improving robustness of LLMs for life-science NLP applications within Collate’s products.
- Build pipelines and infrastructure to deploy AI systems reliably, safely, and at scale.
- Collaborate with product, design, and engineering teams to translate user needs into AI-driven features.
- Develop evaluation frameworks to ensure models are accurate, fair, and trustworthy in real-world life science settings.
- Experiment rapidly, while balancing iteration speed with the rigor required for high-stakes applications.
- Create tools and workflows that make AI development more efficient across the team.
What We’re Looking For
- Hands-on experience building and deploying ML/AI systems in production.
- Strong foundation in deploying search and retrieval systems and NLP applications.
- Ability to bridge research and engineering — from prototyping models to shipping them in user-facing products.
- Comfort working in an early-stage startup where ambiguity is high and ownership is expected.
- Motivation to apply AI to life sciences in a way that prioritizes reliability, safety, and impact.
Why Join Collate?
Impact: Build systems and experiences that touch real patients and providers, improving healthcare outcomes.
Ownership: Shape both our product experience and our engineering culture from the start.
Learning: Collaborate with a uniquely interdisciplinary team—AI researchers, healthcare leaders, and experienced startup builders.
Upside: Join a company early enough to have meaningful equity and career-defining impact.
The base salary range for this role is $150,000–$350,000 USD annually, depending on experience and level (Tier 1, San Francisco)
