Staff Software Engineer

Location: Chicago, New York City

Time Type: Full time

Job Description

Passionate about precision medicine and advancing the healthcare industry?

Recent advancements in underlying technology have finally made it possible for AI to impact clinical care in a meaningful way. Tempus' proprietary platform connects an entire ecosystem of real-world evidence to deliver real-time, actionable insights to physicians, providing critical information about the right treatments for the right patients, at the right time.

We are seeking a visionary Staff Software Engineer to lead the architectural design and implementation of our next-generation Patient Evaluation Engine. In this role, you will move beyond traditional data pipelines to build a sophisticated platform powered by agentic architectures.

You will be responsible for orchestrating autonomous agents that interact with complex healthcare datasets—both structured and unstructured—to drive real-time clinical insights at scale. As a technical leader, you will bridge the gap between high-level AI strategy and robust, production-grade engineering.

Responsibilities

• Architect Agentic Systems: Design and lead the development of a scalable agentic evaluation platform, coordinating specialized AI agents to interact, reason, and execute tasks.

• Orchestrate Intelligence: Build the execution layer for agent input/output, ensuring seamless coordination between agents while meeting rigorous platform performance and scalability demands.

• Data Availability for AI: Architect systems that fetch, parse, and serve both structured and unstructured data to agents in a format optimized for real-time inference.

• Real-Time Execution: Ensure the evaluation engine supports low-latency, real-time clinical workflows, maintaining high availability in mission-critical environments.

• Technical Leadership: Lead scrum teams through the complexities of building in a HIPAA-regulated environment, serving as the primary technical authority and mentor.

• Evolve Engineering Practices: Establish patterns for agent observability, reliability, and "human-in-the-loop" checkpoints to increase the transparency of automated evaluations.

Qualifications

• Expert Architect: Extensive experience as a Staff or Principal Engineer, specifically architecting complex distributed systems or AI-orchestration layers within the healthcare domain.

• Healthcare Data Mastery: Strong working knowledge of healthcare data models and interoperability standards (FHIR, HL7, DICOM) and experience handling genomic data formats.

• Cloud-Native Expert: Proven track record of delivering cloud-native solutions using AWS/GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, and microservices, with a focus on high-throughput data processing.

• Hybrid Environment Strategy: Experience architecting solutions that span hybrid on-prem and cloud environments, specifically tailored for sensitive health system integrations.

• Hands-on Mentor: You maintain "hands-on-keyboard" proficiency, capable of coding alongside the team while simultaneously developing incremental delivery plans in an agile environment.

• Regulatory Fluency: Deep familiarity with building secure, resilient systems within HIPAA and SOC2 compliance frameworks.

Experience Requirements

• Total Professional Experience: 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record of designing and deploying distributed systems at scale.

• Senior Leadership: 3+ years in a Staff, Principal, or Lead Engineer role, specifically overseeing the technical roadmap and architecture for complex platforms.

• AI/ML Orchestration: 2+ years of hands-on experience building applications with Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically focusing on agentic workflows, RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), or autonomous tool-use.

• Healthcare Domain: 5+ years working within HIPAA-regulated environments, with direct experience handling EMR integrations (Epic, Cerner) and healthcare-specific data standards.

• Data Engineering: Demonstrated experience managing both structured (SQL, NoSQL) and unstructured data at a scale of millions of records, ensuring data integrity for downstream AI consumption.

Education

• Primary Requirement: Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Science, or a related technical field.

• Preferred Qualification: Master’s Degree or Ph.D. in Computer Science (with a focus on AI/ML or Distributed Systems) or Biomedical Informatics.

• Alternative Background: Equivalent professional experience and a portfolio of significant contributions to open-source projects or industry-recognized technical white papers will be considered.

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CHI: $135,000-$185,000

NYC: $150,000-$200,000

The expected salary range above is applicable if the role is performed from Illinois and may vary for other locations (California, Colorado, New York). Actual salary may vary based on qualifications and experience. Tempus offers a full range of benefits, which may include incentive compensation, restricted stock units, medical and other benefits depending on the position.

We are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.