Principal Engineer, Technical Lead

Why this role

AI is moving into patient care quickly. AI agents talk to patients and AI scribes write the chart. Most organizations still check care the way they did before AI: a quality team manually reviews a small sample of calls and notes, often under 1%. The rest goes unchecked. Our mission is to make using AI in healthcare safe.

You will set the technical strategy for how we build the platform that gets us there.

About Verbal

Verbal audits patient interactions and clinical notes against a healthcare organization’s own protocols, safety standards, and regulatory requirements. It works the same way whether care is delivered by a clinician, an AI agent, or an AI scribe. We are an early-stage company with a small, distributed engineering team and enterprise health system and health plan customers.

The role

You will be the senior-most engineer and technical lead at Verbal, reporting to the CEO. This is a hands-on role: most of your week goes to designing and writing code, reviewing others’ work, and making the calls on architecture. You will also run sprint planning for a small distributed team, setting each sprint’s objective and breaking down the work. It’s a technical lead role, not a people-management role.

What you’ll own

• Architecture and technical strategy across our audio, transcription, scoring, and integration services.
• Model and vendor choices, weighing performance, cost, and HIPAA requirements.
• Reliability: releases, incident response, and the standards the team ships to.
• Delivery: how the team plans and ships.
• Leading our security and SOC 2 work.
• Being the main technical point of contact for customers and in investor diligence.

What we’re looking for

• You have been the senior-most engineer, or close to it, at a company with fewer than about 30 people.
• You have built and scaled real-time or streaming systems in production.
• You have shipped LLM-based features and know how to evaluate whether they work.
• You have worked with regulated or sensitive data, ideally PHI under HIPAA.
• You have led a small team across time zones while still writing code most days.

Nice to have: speech-to-text or audio pipelines, telephony or EHR integrations, and SOC 2 experience.

How we work

• Ownership. When something breaks in production, it bothers you until it’s fixed. You spot what to improve before anyone asks.
• Assume positive intent. We take each other’s work in good faith, and we say it directly when we disagree.
• Debate to get it right. We challenge ideas, including the CEO’s, until the decision is the best version of itself. Then we commit.

Details

• Stack: Python and TypeScript services on AWS, real-time audio, and LLMs.
• Location: based in the United States. Remote, with occasional visits to the CA Bay Area.
• Compensation: competitive base plus meaningful equity.