AI/ML Lead Engineer

Company Description

Katana Healthcare develops cutting-edge clinical decision support tools designed specifically for frontline healthcare staff. By leveraging advanced Artificial Intelligence, Katana Healthcare delivers fast, accurate, and relevant information to clinicians, enhancing decision-making processes and patient outcomes. Our mission is to empower healthcare professionals through innovative technology to improve the quality of care delivered to patients.

Role Description

We are seeking an experienced AI/ML Lead Engineer to take ownership of the architecture and evolution of our AI backend and lead the next phase of our platform. Katana has already established a strong technical and product foundation, validated through real-world clinical pilots, and this role is focused on building on that momentum to scale and enhance our AI capabilities.

You will design and extend robust systems, develop scalable pipelines, and integrate multiple data sources to power our AI decision support layer. You will operate within a small, high trust team with significant autonomy, where you are expected to be self-sufficient, comfortable working with ambiguity, and capable of figuring things out independently.

A key part of the role is that you enjoy working at pace, bringing ideas through to production quickly, and embracing the energy of a start-up culture. You will solve meaningful problems with real world impact, and play a central role in building both the product and the foundations behind it. If you enjoy moving fast, making things happen, and having a bit of fun while doing it, you will fit in well here.

We are looking for someone who can elevate the architecture, bring structure to complexity, and help drive the transition from early validation to a scalable, production-ready platform.

This role is ideally based in Cork with a hybrid setup, though we are open to fully remote for the right candidate.

Responsibilities:

• Architect and deploy highly scalable RAG pipelines and LLM workflows
• Integrate and fine-tune leading healthcare foundation models, including MedGemma, Claude Healthcare, Gemini, Qwen and OpenAI.
• Design multi-modal data processing systems.
• Build risk probability algorithms that evaluate real-world patient data.
• Lead the end-to-end MLOps lifecycle while establishing rigorous evaluation guardrails to ensure clinical safety accuracy, and compliance with healthcare regulations.
• Experience in healthcare or clinical decision support systems is a strong plus

Required Experience:

• Minimum of 8 years of proven industry experience in machine learning, with at least 3 years functioning as a lead architect or senior technical leader.
• Deep theoretical mastery of core AI/ML mathematics and optimization algorithms.
• Hands-on background in developing custom neural network architectures, information retrieval systems, and advanced natural language processing (NLP) solutions.
• Proven capability to translate academic research and complex theoretical models into production-ready software that directly impacts patient safety.