Cedar
AI Engineer (Applied Scientist) III
Job Description
Our healthcare system is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the U.S. Every year, over 50 million Americans suffer adverse financial consequences as a result of seeking care, from lower credit scores to garnished wages. The challenge is only getting worse, as high deductible health plans are the fastest growing plan design in the U.S.
Cedar’s mission is to leverage data science, smart product design and personalization to make healthcare more affordable and accessible. Today, healthcare providers still engage with its consumers in a “one-size-fits-all” approach; and Cedar is excited to leverage consumer best practices to deliver a superior experience.
The Role:
Cedar is seeking an AI Engineer/Applied Scientist III to join our team and help build and optimize product features powered by generative AI. Our goal is to use AI to drive bill clarity for patients and streamline workflows for our customers, which are large healthcare systems across the US.
This role is for the Support/Kora squad, where you will work on Kora, an AI Voice Agent purpose-built for patient billing, which is the central product for our Cedar Support offering. In this role, you will develop a deep understanding of Cedar’s data and workflows and utilize your skillset in rigorous data analysis combined with production-level coding and rapid execution to design, build, and improve the AI workflows that solve problems for patients via the voice medium.
Responsibilities:
- Build and enhance features for our AI Voice Agent, Kora – utilizing your skillset in production-level coding as well as prompt and context engineering.
- Design robust experiment plans that deconstruct large goals into small testable hypotheses. Execute these plans through iterative development cycles where you ship new features, evaluate how your features work with real patients, and continue to improve and optimize Kora’s behavior to better meet the needs of patients and providers. Through it all, you’ll display a strong ownership mentality, product mindset, and user experience focus.
- Dive into unstructured data with finesse and rigor, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches to solve complex problems. This data can include call transcripts, patient account details, and more.
- Partner closely with other scientists, engineers, designers, and product counterparts to solve problems as a team
- Amplify your programming skillset with AI-enabled coding, as our internal AI agent(s) help us to improve and optimize Kora at a pace that we could not achieve on our own
- Work in a fast-paced environment where we cheer each other on as we find small ways to make the patient experience a little bit better every day, while we work towards our ultimate goal to transform the healthcare financial experience
What this role IS NOT:
- Not machine learning modeling: You will not be training models from scratch; instead you will be leveraging Foundation model APIs and Agent SDK platforms to develop impactful AI Agent systems
- Not a pure “science” or “research” role: In this “end-to-end” role, you will implement your solutions in our production codebase (while effectively leveraging AI coding assistants as part of your toolkit), and your focus will be on making direct impact on our product's performance
- Not pure software engineering: You won't just be engineering straightforward solutions with pre-defined requirements. Instead, you'll develop structured experimentation plans and break down complex problems into testable hypotheses that you launch in an iterative fashion, to rapidly make impact while observing real user behavior to learn what works and what doesn't
- Not a role for those who want to stick to a narrow area of expertise: You will combine your technical skillset with product and design thinking, to work across boundaries and create the solutions that matter — regardless of whether the particular task represents engineering, data science, product, or something in-between!
Skills and Experience:
- 3 or more years of full-time experience working in a structured product development environment on a product that had frequent releases (i.e., regular updates with enhancements, bug fixes, and new features)
- Experience collaborating with partners from different job functions, and the ability to translate business requirements into technical builds
- A strong understanding of both the scientific method and software engineering principles, with a proven ability to balance experimental rigor and rapid production deployment
- Experience with modern programming languages (in this role, you’ll use both Python and Typescript), as well as experience with AI-enabled coding
- Ability to thrive in an entrepreneurial environment, showing a tendency toward speed and action while achieving clarity from ambiguity
- A passion not only for AI, but also in the application of AI to solve real problems for real users. If you are a match for this role, you’ll feel comfortable diving deep into the data to figure out the best way to solve a particular user problem, sharing your findings, incorporating updates based on feedback, and implementing your solution in code. Ultimately doing all of this to make a tangible difference for users
- You are excited by the opportunity to use your combined skillset in data science and AI engineering to make a true impact on patient lives
- Salary/Hourly Rate Range*: $170,000 – $215,000
- This role is equity eligible
- This role offers a competitive benefits and wellness package
What do we offer to the ideal candidate?
- A chance to improve the U.S. healthcare system at a high-growth company! Our leading healthcare financial platform is scaling rapidly, helping millions of patients per year
- Unless stated otherwise, most roles have flexibility to work from home or in the office, depending on what works best for you
- For exempt employees: Unlimited PTO for vacation, sick and mental health days–we encourage everyone to take at least 20 days of vacation per year to ensure dedicated time to spend with loved ones, explore, rest and recharge
- 16 weeks paid parental leave with health benefits for all parents, plus flexible re-entry schedules for returning to work
- Diversity initiatives that encourage Cedarians to bring their whole selves to work, including three employee resource groups: be@cedar (for BIPOC-identifying Cedarians and their allies), Pridecones (for LGBTQIA+ Cedarians and their allies) and Cedar Women+ (for female-identifying Cedarians)
- Competitive pay, equity (for qualifying roles), and health benefits, including fertility & adoption assistance, that start on the first of the month following your start date (or on your start date if your start date coincides with the first of the month)
- Cedar matches 100% of your 401(k) contributions, up to 3% of your annual compensation
- Access to hands-on mentorship, employee and management coaching, and a team discretionary budget for learning and development resources to help you grow both professionally and personally
About us
Cedar was co-founded by Florian Otto and Arel Lidow in 2016 after a negative medical billing experience inspired them to help improve our healthcare system. With a commitment to solving billing and patient experience issues, Cedar has become a leading healthcare technology company fueled by remarkable growth. “Over the past several years, we've raised more than $350 million in funding & have the active support of Thrive and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
As of November 2024, Cedar is engaging with 26 million patients annually and is on target to process $3.5 billion in patient payments annually. Cedar partners with more than 55 leading healthcare providers and payers including Highmark Inc., Allegheny Health Network, Novant Health, Allina Health and Providence.
