Senior Member of Technical Staff (Applied AI)
Location: New York City
Why You Should Join Us
Solstice is redefining how life sciences organizations commercialize therapeutics. We are building a commercial engine that allows pharmaceutical marketers to launch campaigns at 100x the speed. Our mission is to accelerate the knowledge of life-saving medicines.
Rapid growth: Over the past year, we have worked with some of the top life sciences manufacturers and over 50+ pharma brands including Pfizer and AstraZeneca.
A hard technical problem: We are trying to rethink the way the largest, most innovative therapies in the world come to market. Every claim in pharma marketing content must trace to an approved source. Fair balance rules govern placement. All materials go through rigorous medical, legal, and regulatory review, which can last months. Building persuasive and defensible content is a genuine challenge, with no playbook. We have the customers and proprietary data to do this right.
Top-tier investors: Our backers include Transformation Capital, Twelve Below, Virtue and the founders of Datavant, Commure, and Paradigm.
Influence and ownership: This senior role directly shapes our architectural future. We're seeking someone who wants responsibility, not someone who needs work handed to them.
About the Role
We're hiring a senior Applied AI engineer to own the technical direction of our AI systems: retrieval, generation, verification, evaluation, and keeping systems running in production. Nothing's predetermined. When there's a fork in the road, you decide.
You will work closely with VP of Engineering Jay, and co-founders Aris and Yiwen, influencing product strategy, technical hiring, and our market positioning.
What You'll Be Working On
High-craft output: Our clients demand work with polish, not "AI slop." Pharma assets like emails, banners, slides and leave-behinds require both visual and textual excellence. ISI must be prominent, brand systems must endure, and hierarchy and typography must survive generation. Our job isn't just compliance. It's making sure assets don't get quietly rewritten by marketers.
Connecting content to outcomes: Passing MLR review means a piece can ship, but not that it worked. We'll connect generated assets to real-world performance, including engagement, HCP response and scripts written, and use that data to improve future output.
Evaluation where ground truth is slow: Determining compliance is slow, coming back as reviewer redlines in inconsistent formats. Developing offline metrics that track downstream MLR pass rate is critical.
Claim-level attribution: True grounding means every sentence can be traced back to a specific, defensible source. Our proprietary corpora span prescribing information, clinical data, approved assets, style guides and claim libraries, and provenance must be preserved through generation.
ML Ops and behavioral regression: Full CI/CD for ML, versioning, automated testing, monitoring, and the harder under-the-hood work. Upgrades shift output in ways easy stats can miss, and tail risks matter most. Ongoing vigilance is required.
Ideal Traits
Production ownership: Experience shipping, operating, and maintaining ML/LLM systems in production.
Evaluation instinct: History of inventing metrics to measure and improve systems.
Depth in LLMs: Retrieval, agentic pipelines, targeted fine-tuning, and judgment on the best tool for each job.
Full-stack proficiency: Python, FastAPI, Docker, AWS; able to take ideas from research to deployed service independently.
Judgment under ambiguity: Confident decisions amid unknowns; unafraid to be wrong and adjust fast.
Communication: Strong collaboration and feedback skills; direct and open style preferred.
Benefits
Health, dental, and vision insurance
Ground-floor equity opportunity
Visa sponsorship (O-1, H-1B, TN) available
Unlimited PTO
401(k) with 4% match
In-office lunches five days a week
Professional growth stipend
Relocation support
Compensation
Highly competitive NYC salary: $230,000 to $350,000 depending on experience, seniority, and ownership level. We benchmark against elite startups and major tech firms, with flexibility at the top of the range for exceptional talent.
