Founding Full-Stack Software Engineer

About Sophont

Sophont builds open, universal medical AI that understands pathology, neuroimaging, clinical text and more, empowering clinicians and researchers worldwide.

We are a public-benefit corporation driven by a mission to build AI models and applications to advance healthcare and benefit humanity. Together with MedARC, our open-source Discord community, we are dedicated to open science and developing frontier AI models for medicine transparently. We already have a strong track record, having published open-source well-cited research in NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, Nature Biomedical Engineering, and more. As part of our radically transparent approach, you can already join our public meetings to see how we conduct research at Sophont and MedARC.

Sophont is a rare early-stage company with both world-class technical leadership and a mission that matters. Joining Sophont means you are paid to lead and contribute to high-impact medical AI research that will transform healthcare and life sciences.

Our team is composed of leaders in their respective domains, backed by investors from Google (Jeff Dean, Logan Kilpatrick), W&B (Lukas Biewald), Hugging Face (Clem Delangue), Kindred Ventures, Upfront Ventures, and more.

How We Build

Sophont functions differently than other startups. There is no clean separation between thinking and doing. The same people deciding what should exist are the ones building it.

A large part of that work happens in the open. Through MedARC, an open science Discord community, Sophont staff lead groups of highly motivated contributors running experiments, testing ideas, and pushing new directions forward continuously. It is closer to a live research lab than a traditional team.

About the Role

We are seeking a founding full-stack software engineer to build the product layer around Sophont's medical AI research. You will build clinician-facing, researcher-facing, pharma-facing, partner-facing, and internal platforms that make our models useful, testable, secure, and deployable.

Projects will include clinician- and pharma-facing software driven by our foundation models, designed to aid clinical decision support, translational research, and arena leaderboards. The role will also play a significant part in preparing customer-facing demos, internal systems, website maintenance, and public releases.

The work requires product taste, strong backend judgment, and enough AI fluency to turn research prototypes into durable applications. You should be comfortable moving from product requirements to data models, APIs, auth, UI, deployment, observability, cost, latency, correctness, and model integration without waiting for a large team to define every boundary.

What You'll Do

• Build full-stack applications that bring medical foundation models into clinician-facing, researcher-facing, pharma-facing, partner-facing, and internal workflows
• Design backend systems for authentication, user isolation, storage, metadata, auditability, feedback, background jobs, and safe handling of de-identified or partner-provided data
• Integrate model endpoints, inference workflows, retrieval and search components, evaluation systems, and research pipelines into practical web products
• Build product surfaces for clinical decision support, translational research, source-grounded evidence, model comparison, annotation, evaluation, and partner demos
• Improve Sophont's website, blog, and release workflows so publishing research, benchmarks, models, and job postings is reliable rather than brittle
• Deploy and operate services across cloud, cluster-adjacent, and partner-demo environments with pragmatic choices around workers, queues, scaling, observability, and security
• Work closely with researchers, clinicians, and applied scientists to translate rough prototypes into durable product surfaces
• Build tests, observability, and reviewable pull requests so fast development does not degrade reliability
• Help define technical standards and agentic engineering practices for how Sophont builds software around medical AI

What We're Looking For

• Strong full-stack product engineering experience, including modern frontend frameworks, backend APIs, relational databases, auth, storage, and deployment
• Ability to ship polished, usable interfaces without needing a separate design team for every interaction
• Experience building software around AI models, retrieval systems, agents, evaluation tools, large files, or data-heavy workflows
• Strong backend judgment around data isolation, reliability, observability, auditability, and security
• Comfort working with TypeScript or JavaScript and at least one strong backend language or framework such as Python, C#, Go, or Rust
• Comfort with agentic engineering: using AI coding agents to accelerate implementation while grounding work in clear specs, tests, observability, and small reviewable changes
• Ability to reason about cost, latency, correctness, and failure modes in production AI systems
• Clear communication with research, clinical, and business stakeholders

Preferred

• Experience with Svelte, SvelteKit, React, TypeScript, C#/.NET, Entity Framework, FastAPI, Cloudflare Workers, Postgres, Redis, object storage, message queues, Docker, or Kubernetes
• Experience with healthcare software, de-identified clinical workflows, FHIR, SMART on FHIR, CDS Hooks, Epic integrations, or clinical decision support systems
• Experience building LLM applications, agentic systems, medical search tools, or source-grounded evidence products
• Experience building annotation, crowdsourcing, or evaluation platforms
• Experience with pathology, DICOM, whole-slide images, medical imaging viewers, genomics, or other large biomedical data workflows
• Experience with HIPAA, SOC 2, ISO 27001, QMS, MDR, FDA, or other regulated-product constraints
• Experience in an early-stage startup environment where priorities move quickly
• Interest in open-source medical AI and public research communities

Location

This role is fully remote with the ability to mostly dictate your own working hours, provided you can attend core collaboration meetings.

Compensation

The salary range for this role is $100,000-$300,000 USD per year. Benefits include meaningful equity, OpenAI and Anthropic subscriptions, a 401(k) with 4% match, medical, dental, vision, and basic life insurance.

Employees are encouraged to publish and open-source their work and to participate in workshops, hackathons, and conferences.

We are an equal opportunity employer and welcome applicants from all backgrounds.