Principal Engineer, AI and Product Engineering

Job description

## About the Company: [Redesign Health](https://www.redesignhealth.com/) is a global venture and applied technology firm focused on building next-generation healthcare companies. We manage venture capital and venture buyout strategies, each powered by an AI operating system and a team of leading technologists, entrepreneurs, and investors drawn from the most consequential healthcare, AI, and software institutions in the world. Since 2018, Redesign and our portfolio companies have touched the lives of more than 15 million patients, raised over $1.5 billion from premier institutional, sovereign, and strategic investors, and built distinctive partnerships with marquee healthcare organizations and senior leaders around the world. We are headquartered in New York, with offices in Bengaluru, Los Angeles, and Riyadh. ## About the Team: Redesign's technology practice combines a frontier applied AI lab with deep healthtech investing expertise. Members of the practice have founded companies worth more than two billion dollars and built systems that serve hundreds of millions of patients, providers, and expert users, and run inside NASA, CIA, and 90% of the Fortune 500. The practice is responsible for Redesign's technical investments, supports founders with architect-level guidance and more than a million dollars in AI and cloud credits, and builds the agentic operating system at the core of our business. Just as importantly, we help every team at Redesign use that system to become more technical, more creative, and more self-sufficient. We believe everyone is a builder, and that AI can let exceptional operators turn their expertise into software at the speed of thought. We are a team of founders and researchers, musicians and astrophysicists, caregivers and friends. We prize analytical rigor, intellectual humility, and a drive to learn, build, and teach. We have been working on language models since before they were large, but we still reinvent ourselves every day as technology changes how we work and collaborate. We believe that AI will do more good for humanity in healthcare than anywhere else. We know the most impactful member of our team will be someone we have not yet met, and we cannot wait to learn from them. ## About the Job: We're hiring a Principal / Staff Engineer to own the backend and internal platform layer between Redesign’s infrastructure and its applied AI products. This is the technology that makes our data, tools, and development patterns usable by engineers, agents, and the domain experts building software across the firm. One distinctive feature of Redesign is that every person at the company is, in some meaningful sense, a software engineer. Building for that audience is a new and special craft: the platform has to be powerful enough for senior engineers, legible enough for nontraditional builders, and structured enough for agents to use safely. You will report to a VP of Technology, and join a global technology practice built around senior individual contributors with unusually broad ownership. In this role, you will own a full technical domain between infrastructure and applied AI, and build it around agentic principles. ## What You'll Do: At Redesign, everyone builds. Experienced engineers ship more complexity than ever before, domain experts turn judgment into working systems, and agents participate in the path from idea to production. That changes what backend engineering means. The backend is the shared layer of data, access, tools, and conventions that lets many kinds of builders create safely. This role owns that layer between infrastructure and applied AI. - *Build the backend platform behind Redesign’s operating system.* You will own the APIs, databases, services, resource models, migrations, and access patterns that back our core AI operating system. Your job is to make the primitives behind Redesign’s work easy to discover, safe to extend, and hard to misuse, so applications, agents, and builders can consume trusted data without bespoke plumbing. - *Define the paradigm for AI-native development.* You will own the systems and conventions that let agents drive software engineering: agentic coding patterns, harness design, memory management, verification loops, and self-learning multi-agent code review. Done well, this unlocks a trusted path from intent to production: if generated code is safe, standards-compliant, and proven to do what it was meant to do, it can become part of the system without turning human review into a bottleneck. - *Build for a workforce where everyone creates software.* You will own the developer experience for a builder population that brings together infrastructure engineers, applied AI engineers, and domain experts without formal software backgrounds. You will deeply understand how Redesign functions and build powerful primitives that cut across teams, decisions, and geographies. That means thoughtfully designed tools and interfaces that capture the most important work and workflows, and let the whole firm turn judgment into technology at the speed of thought. ## What You'll Need: We value and actively seek exceptional talent from all backgrounds and experiences, recognizing that excellence takes many forms. The strongest candidates have been selected into high-talent environments, distinguished themselves within them, earned unusually broad scope or trusted ownership, progressed rapidly, or done work that changed the trajectory of a team, product, company, or field. While every path is different, we believe the most successful candidates for this role will share the following characteristics: - 10-12+ years of engineering experience, with meaningful time at staff, principal, or equivalent level at a serious software company. You have anchored the technical work of a small, fast team before, and you have owned backend, data, developer-platform, or internal-platform systems that other people built on every day. - You have shipped production backend systems in Python and/or TypeScript, with ownership of database schemas, migrations, API contracts, authentication, and permissions. You have worked deeply with Postgres or a similar relational database; built authorization or identity layers with scoped access for users, services, and agents; and shipped APIs and data services that multiple teams depended on. - You have built or operated agent-facing infrastructure that teams used every day: MCP servers and tools, Claude Code or Cursor conventions, skills or plugin systems, sandboxed execution, code-review automation, evals, usage and cost controls, and safe defaults. You understand that agents are now first-class consumers of backend systems. - You have range across product craft and developer experience. You have built tools, applications, or internal platforms for experienced engineers and for builders without traditional software backgrounds, and you understand that this work is as much about shaping how people encounter the system as it is about creating a technical surface. You have thought deeply about how different kinds of builders climb the AI curve, where they get stuck, and what a great first experience should feel like. - You are AI-native. LLMs and agents have rewired how you build. You are proficient with modern agent frameworks (the Anthropic Agent SDK, Lang\* / Deep Agents, or similar) and have shipped production systems on top of them. You have built sophisticated systems on top of coding agents like Claude Code (skills, MCPs, custom harnesses) and have hardly written code by hand in over a year. - Technology is one of your passions, and you find deep meaning in some other pursuit to which you've devoted your time, thought, and effort: a creative or athletic outlet, a family business, or service. **Strong plus:** track record as a founder, founding engineer, or 0-to-1 product engineering owner inside a small, fast team. **Bonus:** a quantitative degree (or a few) from a strong program; open-source contributions; published work; or a side project other people have actually used. ## Who You Are: - A true builder who is always tinkering, experimenting, and looking for the better way. Where others see one-off app requests, you see the workflows, access patterns, and primitives that could make the next ten requests easier. - Proud of platform craft. You believe the difference between systems people build on and systems people work around is the quality of the design, and the technical and business judgment behind it. - A clear writer who believes English is the most important programming language. Your API docs, migration notes, examples, agent instructions, and tool descriptions make the right path obvious to humans and agents. - Allergic to repeating yourself. If you see the same workaround twice, the third answer is a shared service, MCP tool, template, or platform capability. - Deeply curious about the business, not just the technology. You can read a deal memo, a fundraising deck, and a research note and create great data models, APIs, and tools around them. - You design for agents as first-class users. You think about tools, context, permissions, evals, memory, and failure recovery as product surfaces. - You have thrived in a group of passionate, talented, diverse, and low-ego individuals because these kinds of people love working with you. - You have accomplished something most people haven't: started a company, won an international academic award, shipped a product loved by many, performed music around the world, or overcome difficult circumstances to succeed. You have dedicated your life to excellence in your craft. ## How We Work: Our company values are the standards and norms that shape how we make decisions, build teams, serve patients, and partner with one another. They define what you can expect from us and what we expect from every person who joins our team. We share them openly so candidates can decide whether this way of working will bring out their best. - **Patients are waiting:** Work with the urgency that patients deserve. - **AI sets the floor:** Nothing short of what AI in expert hands can deliver; taste and judgment own the last mile. - **Stack the team:** Talent density is our greatest asset; raise the bar with every hire. - **Trust people, challenge ideas:** Assume good intent; never shy from rigorous debate. - **Sweat your craft:** Take pride in your work; seek feedback to continuously improve. - **Go beyond:** Your role, comfort zone, and expectations for what’s possible. - **Be the partner you want:** High integrity, responsive, and genuinely invested in shared success. - **No shortcuts:** Patient safety, clinical standards, and partner trust above all. ## Compensation and Location: You will work out of our Bengaluru office on a hybrid schedule, with strong overlap into US Eastern and Pacific hours. We target world-class talent and compensate accordingly, with packages containing a mix of cash and fund equity.