Founding AI Engineer — Healthcare

ahtida Health · Remote within Europe (EU/EEA, UK or Switzerland) · Founding-team role, equity-only

This is a hands-on role. You will write the code yourself, every day. It is not a management position, and there is no team to delegate to. Not yet.

About us

ahtida Health is a Swiss health technology company building an AI clinical platform for European primary care. Our goal is to give physicians back the time that software takes from them, and to help them make better decisions with the complete patient picture in front of them. Our principle is simple: AI supports, and the physician decides.

We run our own licensed digital clinic, live with paying patients. This gives us something few AI teams in Europe have: a real, regulated clinical environment to build and validate in.

We were founded in October 2025 and are headquartered in Zürich. We have a research partnership with the ZHAW, an Innosuisse Innovation Cheque, a Women TechEU award and the EUREKA Accelerated label. Our seed round is in progress.

We are remote-first. The team works across Switzerland, Greece and the wider EU, with periodic in-person time in Zürich.

The role

You will build our clinical AI with your own hands, from architecture to production code. You will work alongside our CTO and Co-Founder and our Chief Medical and Regulatory Officer.

This is primarily an AI engineering role: building reliable, safe systems around LLMs, retrieval, agents and evaluation. You do not need to have trained foundation models.

What you will do

• Design, build and deliver clinical AI systems that work with real patient data in a live clinical setting
• Build the evaluation and safety frameworks that show where the system is accurate, where it is safe and where it should not be trusted
• Design for physician oversight and safe behaviour when the system is uncertain
• Build data pipelines with privacy and governance designed in from day one, under revDSG and GDPR
• Lay the engineering foundations for regulated medical software, working with our regulatory lead
• Make the core architecture decisions your future team will inherit

Once the round closes, you will grow and lead the AI engineering team. Until then, you are the team.

What we are looking for

• You write production code, and you want to keep writing it. Show us what you have built
• You have delivered LLM systems to production, not just prototypes or demos
• Strong, practical command of LLM engineering: retrieval, structured output, tool use, agent orchestration and, above all, rigorous evaluation
• Fluency in Python and the modern AI engineering stack, and the ability to deliver end to end without hand-holding
• Genuine interest in healthcare, and ideally experience with clinical data such as clinical NLP, EHR data, FHIR, SNOMED CT or ICD-10
• An understanding of what it takes to build software that will be regulated: traceability, auditability, versioning and human-in-the-loop design
• Judgment about where models should not be trusted, and the discipline to design for that
• Comfort with ambiguity, speed and small-team ownership
• Fluent English. German or Greek is a plus, not a requirement

• Years of experience matter far less to us than what you have actually built. If you are early in your career but have developed serious AI systems, whether at work, in research or in open source, we want to hear from you. If you don't match every line above but the work excites you, apply anyway.

• Nice to have: medical device software experience (MDR, ISO 13485, IEC 62304), published clinical AI research, or time at a health-tech company that reached certification.

Compensation (please read this carefully)

• This role is equity-only. There is no salary yet
• Above industry average equity in ahtida Health because we are asking you to take founder-level risk. Standard founder-style vesting: 4 years, with a 1-year cliff
• More than 60% commitment expected
• Cash compensation begins when the current financing round closes. It will be benchmarked to the market where you are based and agreed in writing at the point of hire, so you are not renegotiating from zero

We are looking for someone who wants to build a category-defining European healthcare AI company and is in a position to take that risk. If you need a salary today, this is not the right role. We would rather tell you that now than waste your time.

How to apply

Send a short note to careers@ahtidahealth.com with your GitHub, portfolio or CV. Links to code you wrote carry more weight than titles. In a few sentences, answer one question: how would you design an evaluation framework for a clinical AI system where a false negative and a false positive carry very different costs?

We read every application personally, no AI screening tools.

ahtida welcomes applicants regardless of age, gender, nationality, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or disability. We assess candidates solely on what they have built and what they can do.