Founding AI/ML Engineer

Ahead Health AG seeks a Founding AI/ML Engineer in Zürich to build a preventive health platform. The role involves designing production AI systems, ensuring clinical safety, and shaping product UX.

The company is developing a European preventive health platform that shifts care from reactive treatment to proactive optimization. This position will architect and ship AI-driven features that combine living health records with clinically governed care, aiming to deliver personal concierge medical experiences to users.

Responsibilities

• Design and deploy end-to-end AI/ML systems, covering everything from initial problem definition to large-scale production.
• Collaborate with product and design teams to shape user experiences for AI features, focusing on conversational flows, trust signals, and how the system communicates uncertainty.
• Establish rigorous evaluation frameworks, automated monitoring, and safety guardrails to ensure clinical-grade quality and reliability.
• Make architectural decisions regarding prompt engineering, context management, agent orchestration, retrieval strategies, model selection, latency, and cost efficiency.
• Implement safety protocols including doctor-in-the-loop review processes, output validation, and regulatory-aligned guardrails to guarantee medical accuracy.
• Define data structures and feedback loops to optimize how health information flows into AI systems, ensuring high data quality.
• Set team conventions for prompt design, evaluation, and observability while educating colleagues on emerging AI innovations.

Requirements

• 5 to 8+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 3 years building and shipping production AI/ML systems.
• Deep understanding of modern AI/ML tools, including LLMs, foundation models, and classical machine learning techniques.
• Proven track record of shipping AI systems supported by robust evaluation infrastructure.
• Strong systems thinking with the ability to balance accuracy, latency, cost, and complexity while designing for failure modes.
• A user-centric mindset with clear opinions on how AI features should feel and behave.
• A founding mindset with experience building products from scratch and establishing new practices.
• Solid software engineering skills in Python, API development, testing, CI/CD, and cloud environments (GCP preferred).
• A strong commitment to responsible AI in healthcare, including data privacy, model bias, explainability, and ethical considerations.

Nice to have

• Experience launching AI-first products as a founder, early employee, or on a new product line.
• Familiarity with fine-tuning, model optimization, distillation, or multi-agent systems.
• Background in medical imaging or classical medical ML, such as nnU-Net, segmentation, computer vision on DICOM, or body composition analysis.
• Healthcare domain knowledge, including clinical workflows, medical terminology, FHIR standards, digital health, or clinical decision support.
• Experience building AI features in regulated or high-stakes domains like healthcare, fintech, or insurance.
• Research background with an M.Sc. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, AI/ML, or a related field.
• Experience with Swiss or European healthcare compliance.

What the company offers

• Full-time role based in Zürich (relocation assistance negotiable) or Europe-based within one time zone of CET.
• Competitive salary of CHF 145K–155K plus significant equity.
• Direct access to medical experts and real customer feedback to inform work.
• Small, experienced, technical, and mission-led team from Google, Coolblue, Kaia Health, and Oxford.

About the company

Ahead Health AG is building Europe's leading preventive health platform, starting with Switzerland. The company is backed by founders and execs from Hugging Face, Cradle, Google, DeepMind, Oviva, Stanford Medicine, GE, Philips, and Coda.

• Mission-led team with a focus on proactive prevention and health optimization.
• Small, experienced, and technical team with backgrounds from top tech and health companies.
• Direct access to medical experts and real customer feedback.