Demo

Research Scientist

Latent
San Francisco, CA Full Time
POSTED ON 7/9/2026
AVAILABLE BEFORE 8/7/2026
About Latent Health

Healthcare today is only truly personalized for two groups: those with wealth and access, and those with physicians in their immediate family.

For everyone else, care is fragmented and impersonal.

Medical history is scattered across systems that don’t communicate. Physicians have minutes to understand decades of context. And when something goes wrong, patients are left with tools that understand medicine broadly—but not the individual.

We believe this can be fundamentally rebuilt.

At Latent Health, we are building systems that understand both:

  • the population (clinical knowledge at scale)
  • and the individual (longitudinal patient history)

Our models are designed to answer complex clinical questions with patient-specific context and verifiable reasoning.

Our dataset represents one of the most clinically diverse populations in the United States, including patients with chronic illness and complex disease. Each patient record contains extraordinary depth.

ML at Latent Health

The Machine Learning team is responsible for building systems that run in real clinical workflows.

We Work On

  • Verifiable reinforcement learning at scale
  • Mid-training and post-training of foundation models
  • Novel objectives derived from longitudinal patient data

We are a small group of researchers and engineers focused on pushing the frontier while shipping real systems into production.

We are a small team and expect engineers to take ownership of critical systems, not components.

The Role

As a Machine Learning Engineer, Research, you will own the design and development of novel modeling approaches that advance state-of-the-art clinical intelligence.

You will drive research from ambiguous problem definition through to validated results and downstream impact, shaping the technical direction of how models learn from longitudinal patient data.

We are primarily hiring for senior and staff-level engineers who are comfortable owning critical research problems end-to-end.

This role involves working on problems that directly impact real patient outcomes.

What You’ll Do

  • Own research initiatives end-to-end, including problem formulation, experimental design, modeling, and evaluation
  • Develop novel architectures, training methods, and objectives leveraging longitudinal patient data
  • Work on verifiable reinforcement learning, mid-training, and post-training of foundation models
  • Design rigorous evaluation methodologies to assess model reasoning, correctness, and clinical relevance
  • Make and own tradeoffs between model capability, interpretability, and verifiability in high-stakes settings
  • Collaborate with clinicians and engineers to define meaningful problem formulations grounded in real-world workflows
  • Partner with ML engineers to ensure research translates into deployable systems

What We’re Looking For

  • Strong foundation in machine learning, deep learning, or a related technical field
  • Track record of driving ML research or novel modeling work from idea to validated results
  • Experience working on ambiguous research problems with limited prior art
  • Hands-on experience with PyTorch or similar frameworks
  • Ability to operate independently in high-ambiguity environments with minimal guidance
  • Strong technical judgment — you can identify meaningful problems, design appropriate approaches, and evaluate results rigorously
  • Comfort working in a fast-moving, early-stage environment
  • Experience working on systems where decisions have real-world consequences (e.g., healthcare, finance, infrastructure)

Nice to Have

  • Publications at top-tier ML venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR)
  • Experience with LLMs, NLP, or sequence modeling
  • Experience with reinforcement learning or alignment methods
  • Experience working with longitudinal or structured data at scale
  • Experience working with clinical, biomedical, or scientific domains

Why Join Latent Health

  • Work on high-stakes problems with real impact on patient care
  • Build systems that define how AI is trusted in clinical decision-making
  • Significant ownership in a small, high-caliber team
  • Competitive compensation and meaningful equity

Location

We are based in San Francisco and work together in person.

We spend most of the week in the office and prioritize candidates who are excited to work this way.

Compensation

  • Base salary: $225,000 – $300,000
  • Meaningful equity in an early-stage, Series A company

Closing

If you’re interested in building systems that bring truly personalized healthcare to millions of patients, we’d love to talk.

Salary : $225,000 - $300,000

If your compensation planning software is too rigid to deploy winning incentive strategies, it’s time to find an adaptable solution. Compensation Planning
Enhance your organization's compensation strategy with salary data sets that HR and team managers can use to pay your staff right. Surveys & Data Sets

What is the career path for a Research Scientist?

Sign up to receive alerts about other jobs on the Research Scientist career path by checking the boxes next to the positions that interest you.
Income Estimation: 
$108,245 - $136,486
Income Estimation: 
$136,683 - $171,343
Income Estimation: 
$108,245 - $136,486
Income Estimation: 
$136,683 - $171,343
Income Estimation: 
$77,900 - $95,589
Income Estimation: 
$101,387 - $124,118
Employees: Get a Salary Increase
View Core, Job Family, and Industry Job Skills and Competency Data for more than 15,000 Job Titles Skills Library

Job openings at Latent

  • Latent York, NY
  • About The Role We’re looking for a Workplace Experience Manager who loves creating environments where people feel welcomed, supported, and excited to be. T... more
  • 4 Days Ago

  • Latent York, NY
  • Make Latent the most memorable brand in healthcare. Scale taste and creative systems. About Latent Latent Health is the leading pharmacy intelligence platf... more
  • 5 Days Ago

  • Latent San Francisco, CA
  • About Latent Health Healthcare today is only truly personalized for two groups: those with wealth and access, and those with physicians in their immediate ... more
  • 9 Days Ago

  • Latent San Francisco, CA
  • Technical Sourcer We’re building a high-caliber technical team in a competitive market. This role owns the top of the funnel —finding, engaging, and buildi... more
  • 9 Days Ago


Not the job you're looking for? Here are some other Research Scientist jobs in the San Francisco, CA area that may be a better fit.

  • Michael Page International San Francisco, CA
  • Established tech startup in SF Hiring a Research Scientist with experience building LLM's About Our Client This opportunity is with a well-established tech... more
  • 5 Days Ago

  • goodfire San Francisco, CA
  • About Goodfire Goodfire is a research company using interpretability to understand, learn from, and design AI systems. Our mission is to build the next gen... more
  • 6 Days Ago

AI Assistant is available now!

Feel free to start your new journey!