Forward Deployed AI Engineer

PicnicHealth is simplifying clinical research with AI, making it faster and cheaper to get new treatments to patients. The Forward Deployed AI Engineer will bridge the gap between the AI team and Study Delivery, implementing AI-powered solutions and enhancing operational workflows.

Responsibilities:

• Embed with Study Delivery to deeply understand how studies are created, launched, and run, becoming the technical expert who knows both the platform and the operational workflows
• Identify and implement AI-powered automation for repetitive, manual processes, using our in-house AI capabilities as well as off-the-shelf LLMs
• Ship product features in our operator portal, solving real problems you've observed firsthand while embedded with the team
• Create tooling and scripts that solve immediate operational pain points, whether that's a Retool dashboard or a lightweight one-off AI agent
• Enable non-engineering teams to adopt AI tools in their own workflows, from setting up AI-assisted coding environments to training teams on new capabilities
• Act as the connective tissue between Study Delivery and the broader engineering and product organization, surfacing the highest-impact problems and ensuring that roadmaps reflect real operational needs

Requirements:

• Thriving in ambiguous environments where you need to find the right problems to solve, not just the right solutions, often by observing workflows firsthand rather than waiting for requests
• Being energized by working directly with non-technical teams and building things that transform their operations
• Moving fast and iterating, favoring working solutions over perfect architectures
• 3+ years of experience writing production software, with strong fundamentals in both Python and TypeScript
• Comfort working across the stack, from React frontends to backend services, databases, and infrastructure
• Experience building with LLMs or AI APIs, whether that's agents, RAG, prompt engineering, or integrating models into real workflows
• Experience in life sciences, clinical research, or healthcare
• Experience at startups, ideally on a founding team or early stage
• Familiarity with clinical trial workflows, EMR data, or regulatory processes
• Experience building internal tools or automation for operations teams