Applied AI Engineer

Company Description MedAscend is an award-winning healthcare education technology company using AI-powered virtual patients and clinical simulation to improve how healthcare professionals learn and practise. Our platform enables medical, nursing, pharmacy, dental, and allied health learners to develop consultation, clinical reasoning, and decision-making skills through safe, repeatable simulations. MedAscend works with universities, healthcare organisations, and training providers in the UK and internationally. Role Description We are looking for an Applied AI Engineer to build and improve the AI systems that power MedAscend’s virtual patient simulations and personalised learning experiences. You will work closely with our engineering, product, and clinical education teams to develop reliable, safe, and responsive AI features. This is a hands-on role involving generative AI, conversational systems, model evaluation, backend development, and production deployment. Responsibilities * Build and operate production features powered by hosted large language models. * Develop real-time conversational experiences using speech-to-text, text-to-speech, audio streaming, and turn-taking. * Design, test, and maintain prompts, structured outputs, tool calling, and model workflows. * Evaluate models and providers across quality, latency, reliability, safety, and cost. * Build testing and evaluation frameworks for AI accuracy, consistency, bias, and content quality. * Implement appropriate safeguards for use in healthcare education. * Monitor AI performance and improve features using user feedback and production data. * Collaborate with engineers, product teams, clinicians, and educators. * Contribute to technical design, documentation, and continuous improvement of the platform. Essential Requirements * Strong TypeScript and Node.js skills, with the ability to use Python where required. * Production experience working with hosted large language model APIs. * Experience with prompt engineering, structured outputs, streaming, and tool or function calling. * Experience building real-time audio or conversational systems. * Familiarity with websocket-based applications, speech-to-text, and text-to-speech services. * Experience deploying and operating cloud-based, serverless, or edge applications. * Understanding of AI evaluation, tracing, monitoring, and prompt versioning. * Strong software engineering fundamentals, including testing, observability, APIs, and version control. * Ability to work independently and communicate clearly in a remote team. Desirable Experience * Experience in healthcare, education technology, or another regulated or safety-sensitive sector. * Knowledge of multimodal AI across text, speech, and images. * Experience with multilingual conversational or speech systems. * Familiarity with retrieval-augmented generation, fine-tuning, or machine learning frameworks. * Experience with typed database tooling and server-rendered web applications. * Contributions to open-source AI or software projects. * A degree in computer science, engineering, data science, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. Why Join MedAscend? You will have the opportunity to build practical AI systems used in real healthcare education settings, work directly with clinical and technical experts, and take meaningful ownership within a growing technology company. MedAscend welcomes applicants from a range of backgrounds and values practical ability, sound engineering judgement, and a commitment to building safe and effective AI products. See full job ad here: https://medascend.ai/careers