Software Engineer, AI Engineer

Cognita’s mission is to increase the world’s access to healthcare. Radiology is (1) the first-line diagnostic specialty, (2) facing a worsening global workforce shortage, and (3) highly digitized, making it uniquely positioned for AI to have an enormous impact. Stage one of Cognita is focused on expanding access to radiology at scale.

Our founding team met at Stanford, where they laid the groundwork for applying comprehensive AI to radiology. Building on that foundation, Cognita develops vision-language models that read radiology studies the way radiologists do - interpreting the full study in clinical context - and generate draft results that make radiologists more efficient and accurate. In partnership with Radiology Partners, Cognita’s models are trained and validated on one of the world’s largest real-world radiology datasets.

About the Role

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will build the full-stack systems that connect Cognita’s models to real clinical radiology workflows. This role focuses on radiologist voice dictation, report generation, vision-to-text report creation pipelines, and AWS-based backend systems.

Your Impact

• Build and operate frontend and backend services that support Cognita’s radiology platform.
• Build radiology reporting systems that transform model outputs and radiologist voice dictation into structured radiology reports.
• Develop workflows for report drafting, editing, and clinician sign-off.
• Work with large volumes of structured and unstructured data, including imaging metadata and model outputs.
• Ensure platform services are reliable, secure, low-latency, and scalable.
• Collaborate closely with ML training, evaluation, and infrastructure teams to integrate inference into production workflows.
• Own services end-to-end, from design and implementation through deployment and operation.

What You Bring

• We are not credential-driven. We only look for evidence of exceptional ability.
• Strong experience building full-stack systems in production.
• Experience designing and operating cloud-based services, ideally on AWS.
• Comfort building and owning API-driven, data-intensive systems.
• Experience with distributed systems and production reliability.
• Familiarity with a modern backend stack, such as:
• AWS (e.g., EC2, S3, ECS/EKS, IAM, Cloud Watch)
• Python backend services (e.g. FastAPI or similar)
• Postgre
  
  SQL or similar relational databases
• Strong ownership mindset and good systems judgment.

What Sets You Apart

• Experience with report generation, structured text pipelines, or document workflows.
• Familiarity with ML inference pipelines or AI-powered products.
• Experience working in healthcare or other regulated environments.

Our Culture

• We’re an in-person team based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Working together every day helps us move faster, learn from each other, and build strong relationships. We believe the best work happens when great people are in the same room.
• We build from first principles. We question assumptions, reason from fundamentals, and execute with speed and clarity, without sacrificing quality.
• We operate as a true meritocracy. Impact matters, rather than optics. Feedback is direct, respect is non-negotiable, and we support each other with the ownership, trust, and resources needed to do the best work of our careers.
• Every decision we make is grounded in supporting clinicians to improve patient outcomes.