AI software Engineer - Project Tricorder at Founders Factory

We're looking for a hands-on engineer to build two foundations of the Tricorder product: the evaluation harness and training data pipeline behind our AI models, and a clinical knowledge base grounded in tactical combat care, SNOMED CT and ICD-10.

About Project Tricorder - https://www.tricorder-systems.com/

Most healthcare technology assumes a hospital: reliable power, connectivity and a clinician at a desk. Care increasingly happens somewhere else - in the field, in transit, in remote and contested environments, and in the critical minutes before a patient reaches a ward.

Tricorder builds the deployable clinical infrastructure for that world: a rugged, self-contained hardware and software platform that lets clinical teams capture, monitor and act on patient data anywhere, even when the network or the grid can't be relied on. It is a dual-use venture serving defence medical and civilian pre-hospital care.

Our prototype product is already in user testing. Edge AI sits at the core: multimodal language models that turn video, sensor data and clinical notes into patient records, drive predictions and inform data-driven learnings across deployments. To trust those models in the field, we need rigorous data and evaluation - that's where you come in.

What you'll do

You'll own two workstreams, working day to day with the founder and the FF build team.

1. Data pipeline and evaluation harness

Build the data foundations that tell us whether our models are good enough for clinical use.

• Data labelling: design labelling schemas and guidelines, set up tooling, and run labelling with clinical input, including quality checks and inter-annotator agreement.

• Data processing: build reproducible pipelines to ingest, clean, de-identify and transform multimodal data (video, sensor streams, text).

• Video data organisation: structure, version and catalogue video datasets so clips, annotations and metadata stay searchable and traceable.

• Training dataset preparation: assemble balanced, well-documented train, validation and test splits, with clear lineage from raw data to model input.

• Eval harness: build an automated harness that benchmarks vision-language and NLP models against clinically meaningful metrics, tracks regressions and supports build-vs-buy model decisions.

2. Clinical knowledge base

Build the structured clinical knowledge base that turns unstructured input into coded, interoperable records.

• Database design: design the schema and stand up the data store for clinical concepts and their relationships.

• Clinical terminologies: ingest and map TC3, SNOMED CT, ICD-10 and related NHS standards, including cross-mappings between them.

• Natural language processing: extract entities and relationships from clinical text and link them to coded concepts.

• Document handling: parse and structure clinical documents (PDFs, notes, forms) into the database.

• Clinical knowledge: work with clinicians to make sure the database reflects real-world clinical reasoning and pre-hospital workflows.

By the end of the first 3 months, we'd expect a working eval harness in use for model decisions, a labelled and versioned core dataset, and a first version of the knowledge base linked to the product.

What we're looking for

We don't expect one person to be expert in everything below. Strong candidates will be deep in one workstream and credible in the other.

Must-haves

• Strong Python and data engineering skills, with a track record of shipping production data or ML pipelines, not just research notebooks.

• Hands-on experience building ML evaluation frameworks, benchmarks or test harnesses, ideally for vision, video or language models.

• Experience running data labelling and training-data preparation, including annotation tooling and quality control.

• Working knowledge of databases and data modelling.

• Practical NLP experience: entity extraction, entity linking or document parsing.

• Comfort handling sensitive data under data protection and clinical safety constraints.

• Pragmatism and speed: you can work with ambiguity, make good build-vs-buy calls and ship in weeks, not quarters.

Nice to have

• Experience with SNOMED CT, ICD-10, dm+d or other NHS clinical terminologies and coding.

• A background in health-tech, clinical informatics or another regulated domain such as defence.

• Experience with video data at scale (frame sampling, temporal annotation, multimodal datasets).

• Familiarity with FHIR or HL7 interoperability standards.

• Experience working with LLMs and VLMs, including edge or on-device deployment.

• Early-stage startup experience, especially as a founding or early engineer.

Probably not the right fit if

• You need detailed specs and a large team around you to be effective.

• You prefer pure research over building tools people use every day.

This is a high urgency opening, and we are flexible to consider applicants either on a more flexible consultancy agreement (rolling by mutual agreement, with a competitive day rate); or a long term permanent employment contract with shares as part of the package and scope to grow into a longer-term role as Tricorder builds its engineering team.

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