ML Engineer (Evaluation & Product)

About the role

ML Engineer (Evaluation & Product)

About the Role

Kadence is partnered with a Healthtech start-up in SF, looking for an ML/AI Engineer who thinks like a product owner, not just a model builder. This is a generalist-leaning role for someone who wants to sit close to users and outcomes, someone who has run a roadmap.

The guiding philosophy on their team is evaluation-driven development: evals dictate what gets built. We're not looking for research depth for its own sake, we're looking for someone who can define what "good" looks like for a feature, build the evals to measure it, and iterate against them relentlessly until the product is genuinely great.

This is a high-leverage hire. Done right, this person raises the bar for the whole team and reduces the need for several future hires.

What You'll Do

Own features end-to-end: from defining success criteria and evals, through building and shipping, to iterating based on real product feedback

Build and maintain evaluation frameworks that directly drive what gets prioritized and built next

Work closely with product and design as a full partner, not just an engineering resource - proactively shape the roadmap rather than waiting for fully-specified requirements

Apply strong software engineering fundamentals to ML/AI systems - this is not a research role, it's a product engineering role with an AI core

Move fast and take ownership of ambiguous problems without needing them pre-broken-down

What We're Looking For

Product ownership mentality. You've worked on a vertical, pod-based product team - not a horizontal/platform/infra team. You're used to saying things like "I work with my PM," "I own this feature," or "I'm on this pod," not "I pick up tickets from the backlog."

Strong software engineering grounding. You can write production-quality code and reason about systems, not just notebooks and models.

Evaluation-driven instincts. You default to asking "how would we know if this is working?" before "how do we build this?"

Proactive, not reactive. You've operated with a roadmap and backlog you helped shape, not just requirements handed to you.

High bar, portable standards. Experience at a company known for strong engineering standards is a plus - ideally from a B2B or product-facing pod rather than a horizontal/data-platform org. That said, we care much more about the profile above than the specific employer on your resume.

Compensation: $150-$200k base, plus equity