Software Engineer, AI Research & Prototyping

About the role

Sage Care is a fast-growing, early-stage healthcare startup focused on transforming healthcare by simplifying care navigation. Our platform makes it easier for patients to find the right doctor, helps providers focus on those who need them most, and ensures faster access to care, delivering better care and stronger economic outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Track emerging techniques in voice AI and agent orchestration, and identify which ones matter for us.
• Build rapid prototypes and test them against real conversation data or within engineering development processes.
• Run head-to-head evaluations of models, providers, and techniques (reasoning approaches, speech models, orchestration patterns).
• Turn every investigation into a team-usable artifact: a benchmark, a written deep-dive, a tech talk, or a recommendation with evidence.
• Work with platform engineers to hand off validated ideas for production implementation.

Requirements

• 3+ years of software engineering or applied ML experience.
• Strong coding skills; able to build and run your own experiments end-to-end without infrastructure support.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs: prompting, evaluation, and an intuition for how model behavior changes across techniques and providers.
• Experimental rigor: experience designing tests with controls, baselines, and honest measurement.
• A track record of teaching or knowledge transfer in some form: teaching or TA experience, workshops, technical writing, internal tech talks, well-documented open source, or developer education.
• Intellectual honesty: comfortable reporting that a promising idea did not work.

Nice to have

• Advanced degree (MS/PhD) in CS, ML, or a related field, or equivalent research experience.
• Experience with voice or speech systems (STT, TTS, real-time pipelines).
• Publications, technical blog posts, or open-source work we can read.
• Experience taking a prototype through to production with an engineering team.
• Experience evaluating AI systems in healthcare or other high-stakes domains.