Applied AI Engineer
First seen by Alion on Oct 19, 2026.
1. Role Summary
Oncoshot turns unstructured clinical documents (clinical notes, pathology, radiology and genomic reports) into a structured, research-grade record of each institution’s cancer population: diagnoses, histology, TNM and overall stage, biomarkers, treatments and disease status. This extraction runs on open-weight large language models deployed inside each hospital’s own environment, because patient-derived content cannot leave the institution. The Applied AI Engineer (LLM Extraction) designs, builds and improves these extraction pipelines, and is accountable for the measured accuracy of the data they produce.
This is a hands-on engineering role, not a research position: turning oncology concepts into precise extraction tasks, engineering prompts, schemas and pipelines around models we host ourselves, and proving every change with numbers rather than examples. To see how we measure extraction quality, look at our open-source evaluation framework, llmvalidate (https://github.com/Oncoshot/llm-validation-framework), which this role works with and extends.
We are hiring at senior level by preference, and we welcome mid-level and early-career candidates who show strong fundamentals and want to grow into the role. We invest in training, including the clinical and oncology domain knowledge. The level and salary are set at offer, based on assessment.
2. Key Responsibilities
• Own extraction pipelines end to end: For each clinical document type, from classification and chunking through structured extraction and normalisation to clinical coding standards, with a confidence score and source justification for every extracted field.
• Engineer for open-weight models: Select, benchmark, serve and optimise LLMs that run on hardware the hospital controls, balancing accuracy against latency and GPU cost. Decide where a rule, lookup or curated vocabulary does the job better than a model call.
• Let the numbers decide: Evaluate every change against gold-standard datasets — precision, recall, F1 and F2 per field, document type and institution — using the methodology defined with the data science team, and use error analysis to choose what ships.
• Own the evaluation harness and release gates: Build the evaluation code and the regression gates that stop a model, prompt or rule change from shipping when quality drops below the agreed bar.
• Onboard new institutions and document types: Adapt the pipeline to how a new hospital’s documents differ, and validate against agreed thresholds before go-live.
• Ship production-grade code: Well-tested, typed Python services and APIs, delivered through code review and CI and supported in production.
• Protect patient data: Keep patient-derived data inside the institution and identifiers out of logs and tickets, use hosted frontier models only for offline benchmarking on synthetic or non-sensitive data, and contribute to AI governance and ISO 27001 evidence.
3. Preferred Qualifications
We don’t expect any one candidate to have all of these; strong Python, measurement rigour and curiosity about clinical data matter most.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Data Science, Computational Linguistics, Biomedical Informatics, or a related field.
• Experience building LLM or NLP systems that run in production, with strong hands-on Python.
• LLM application engineering: prompt and schema design, structured output, and multi-step and long-document pipelines.
• Serving and optimising open-weight models (e.g. Hugging Face, vLLM), including quantisation and GPU cost/latency trade-offs.
• Evaluation literacy: precision, recall, F1 and F2, error analysis, gold-standard datasets, and regression testing of models and prompts.
• Software engineering: testing, typing, API design (e.g. FastAPI), containers and CI, on cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure or GCP), including GPU workloads.
• Experience with clinical or biomedical text is strongly preferred (e.g. pathology or genomic reports, ICD-O-3, AJCC TNM, SNOMED CT, RxNorm, HGNC), as is familiarity with health-data privacy frameworks (PDPA, GDPR, HIPAA).
4. Core Competencies
• Pragmatic model judgement: Picks the simplest approach that meets the quality bar, whether a rule, a smaller model or a better prompt, and knows when an LLM is the wrong tool.
• Clinical precision: Turns ambiguous medical concepts into exact, testable extraction definitions, and asks a clinician when the answer is not clear-cut.
• Communication across audiences: Explains model quality, uncertainty and trade-offs credibly to clinical, commercial and engineering stakeholders.
5. Success Measures (First 3 Months during Probation Period)
The scope of these goals is agreed at offer according to level.
• Took ownership of at least one existing extraction pipeline: running its evaluation, diagnosing its errors and releasing changes independently.
• Published a per-field quality baseline for the pipelines owned, with thresholds agreed with the CTO.
• Delivered at least one measured accuracy improvement, or a new document type or field, through the regression gates without a quality drop elsewhere.
6. Working Model
• Reporting line: Reports to the Chief Technology Officer.
• Location & arrangement: Hybrid, based in Singapore (one-north), with occasional on-site work at partner hospitals in Singapore.
• Eligibility: Open to Singapore Citizens and Permanent Residents only.
• Team structure: Works with clinicians and the clinical validation team on what “correct” means for each field, with the data science team on how quality is measured, and with Oncoshot’s platform, data pipeline and product teams.
• Cadence: Agile/Scrum, with sprint planning, refinement and reviews.
7. Salary Range
Indicative monthly gross salary: SGD4,000 – SGD10,000, based on experience and seniority.
Skills
Model Serving, Hospital Information System, Pipelines, Medical Writing, AWS, Regression Testing, Clinical Data Management, Model Evaluation, Computer Science, Data Documents, Low Latency, Post-production Support, Production System, Data Extraction, FastAPI, Clinical Data