South San Francisco, California Senior Software Engineer, AI Platform

About this role

Senior Software Engineer, AI Platform

South San Francisco, California | On-site

Color is revolutionizing cancer care with the nation’s first Virtual Cancer Clinic, delivering high-quality, physician-led multidisciplinary care across all 50 states. Our innovative, guideline-based approach spans cancer screening, risk assessment, prevention, diagnosis, treatment support, and survivorship. In addition to personalized direct medical care, our services include cancer genetics risk assessment, nutrition, mental health support and at-home cancer screening diagnostics. Using technology-driven, patient-centric solutions, Color is transforming how employers, unions, health plans, and governments address cancer. Color’s goal is to close critical cancer care gaps, improve cancer outcomes, and guide patients with empathy through their healthcare journeys.

The Team:

The AI Platform Team explores how rapidly evolving AI capabilities can create meaningful impact for patients, clinicians, and Color teams. We are a small, highly collaborative, cross-functional team of engineers, product managers, designers, and clinical partners. We build AI applications, experiment with emerging models, tools, techniques and interaction patterns, and turn what works into durable patterns and capabilities that can be used across Color.

We embrace rapid experimentation, learning quickly from new technologies and real-world use, and bringing the most promising ideas into production. Given the pace at which AI is advancing, our goal is not simply to adopt the latest AI technology, but to identify where it creates meaningful value in cancer care and deliver AI experiences that are safe, reliable, and impactful.

The Role:

We’re hiring a full-stack Senior Software Engineer to build AI products and the platform that powers them across Color.

This new role will report to the Senior Director of AI Platform and work across the stack - from intuitive clinician and patient-facing AI experiences to the backend services and infrastructure that power them. This is a full-stack role and we’re looking for candidates with senior level experience across frontend, backend and systems engineering.

We seek a hands-on builder with strong product instincts and deep curiosity about AI. You should be someone who experiments constantly, follows advancements in models and tooling, and translates emerging capabilities into reliable products. You will also raise Color’s AI fluency by sharing insights and demonstrating effective building patterns.

How You’ll Contribute:

• Build full-stack AI applications for Color’s care teams and patients, owning features from user experience through backend services, AI orchestration, data access, and production deployment.
• Explore where emerging AI capabilities can meaningfully improve cancer care and how Color works, moving rapidly from ideas to prototypes to shipped experiences.
• Experiment rapidly with emerging AI capabilities, turning promising models, tools, and techniques into prototypes and incrementally evolving the best ideas into production systems.
• Develop reliable LLM-powered systems, including retrieval and knowledge systems, citations and grounding, prompt management, structured outputs, tool use, agentic workflows, and evaluation.
• Develop the evaluation, observability, and safety practices needed to understand AI quality, compare approaches, identify regressions, and confidently evolve successful experiments into durable products.
• Design privacy- and security-conscious systems appropriate for sensitive healthcare data and clinical workflows.
• Partner closely with product, design, clinical, and engineering teams to understand problems, prototype solutions, learn from users, and ship improvements quickly.
• Raise Color’s AI fluency by sharing experiments, emerging techniques, lessons learned, and strong patterns for building with AI across the company.
• Mentor others and raise the technical and product quality bar.

Possible Projects To Contribute To:

• Healthbook: Build and evolve an internal AI application that helps our care and clinical teams understand patients’ longitudinal health histories, synthesize records, answer grounded questions with citations, and draft documents using an AI agent.
• AI Platform: Build shared capabilities that enable teams across Color to develop reliable AI applications quickly, including knowledge bases and retrieval, citations and grounding, prompt management, evaluation, observability, and reusable agentic patterns.
• What’s next: Explore the next generation of patient-facing AI experiences, and turn what we learn into platform capabilities that enable teams across Color to build with AI.

Our Ideal Candidate Will Have:

• 5+ years of experience building and shipping production software, with strong full-stack skills across React/TypeScript, Python, APIs, data integrations, and cloud infrastructure.
• Hands-on experience building production AI products with modern LLMs, including patterns such as RAG, structured outputs, tool calling, agentic workflows, prompt engineering, and model evaluation.
• Experience turning complex, heterogeneous data into useful product experiences and taking systems from prototype through production, including testing, monitoring, and iteration.
• Strong product judgment and the ability to balance speed, technical quality, reliability, and user impact in ambiguous, rapidly evolving environments.
• A bias toward tinkering, rapid experimentation, and learning. You start small, prototype quickly, measure what works, and recognize when new AI capabilities create opportunities for a larger leap.
• An informed point of view on how AI is changing software engineering and product development. You regularly experiment with new models, frameworks, coding tools, agent architectures, and interaction patterns—and communicate what you learn. You are someone others at Color look to for what’s new in AI, what works in practice, and how we should apply it.

Nice to Have:

• Experience building AI platforms or shared infrastructure that empowered multiple teams to ship AI applications.
• Experience developing healthcare technology involving sensitive clinical data.

We believe that all people are capable of great things. We encourage you to apply even if you do not meet all of the requirements that are listed within this job description.

What We Offer:

• 💰 Competitive salary
• ✨ Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life, and disability benefits
• 📈 401k match
• 📝 Monthly phone and wifi stipend for employees, annual ergonomic stipend
• 🏝 Generous vacation policy, paid holidays and company-wide recharge days
• 🍼 Equal paid parental leave for birthing and non-birthing parents
• Free cancer screening and prevention resources for employees and their adult dependents

Base Salary Range: $175,000 - $230,000