Founding Engineer

Summary

Join a mission-driven AI healthcare startup as a Founding Engineer to design and develop an AI-driven cognitive screening and assessment platform. You will lead the selection of the tech stack, develop speech processing models for cognitive health assessments, apply generative AI models, and build real-time speech-to-text and voice analysis pipelines. Collaboration with data scientists, neuroscientists, and clinicians is key to refining AI applications. This role requires significant experience in AI/ML engineering, speech processing, NLP, and generative AI. The position offers competitive salary, founding equity, performance-based equity increases, salary growth potential, a flexible remote-first work environment, and the opportunity to shape the future of cognitive health.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in AI/ML engineering, with a strong background in speech processing, NLP, and generative AI
• Expertise in speech analysis, including automatic speech recognition (ASR), speech-to-text, speaker diarization, prosody analysis, and sentiment detection
• Experience with speech AI frameworks (e.g., DeepSpeech, Whisper, Kaldi, Mozilla TTS, OpenAI Whisper)
• Proficiency in machine learning frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch, Hugging Face, OpenAI APIs)
• Strong understanding of acoustic modelling, phonetics, and computational linguistics in healthcare applications
• Hands-on experience in cloud-based AI deployments (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and API development
• Familiarity with FHIR/HL7, HIPAA compliance, and healthcare data security best practices

Responsibilities

• Lead the selection of our tech stack, ensuring scalability, security, and AI integration
• Develop speech processing models for cognitive health assessments, analyzing speech patterns, fluency, pauses, and language structure to detect cognitive decline
• Apply existing generative AI models (e.g., LLMs, transformers, speech-to-text AI) to enhance healthcare decision-making
• Build real-time speech-to-text and voice analysis pipelines, integrating acoustic, prosodic, and linguistic features for cognitive assessment
• Implement NLP models to analyze spoken and written language patterns in patient interactions
• Work on multi-modal AI approaches, integrating speech, text, and behavioural data for more comprehensive cognitive screening
• Design and implement secure, cloud-based architectures that comply with HIPAA and healthcare data regulations
• Collaborate with data scientists, neuroscientists, and clinicians to refine AI applications for cognitive health
• Drive best practices in AI ethics, model explainability, and bias mitigation for speech-based assessments

Preferred Qualifications

Entrepreneurial mindset—experience in early-stage startups or AI product development is a plus

Benefits

• Competitive salary + founding equity (significant ownership stake)
• Performance-based equity increases tied to key product milestones
• Salary growth potential as the company scales
• Flexible, remote-first work environment
• Opportunity to work directly with a mission-driven founder with deep experience in cognitive health innovation
• Chance to shape the AI-driven future of cognitive health and dementia care