Software Engineer, Python, Backend Developer

Bringing a new drug to market takes over a decade and costs more than a billion dollars. A huge portion of that time and cost sits in clinical trials, where teams of medical reviewers manually comb through patient data looking for errors, inconsistencies, and safety signals before anything reaches regulators. The work is slow, expensive, and error-prone, and it has barely changed in decades.
Octozi is changing that. We are building the AI-powered review platform that pharma sponsors and CROs use to clean and review clinical trial data faster and more reliably than manual review. We have signed contracts with multiple pharma customers running live studies, and we are backed by a $3M seed round.

Our recent paper documents what the platform achieves on real oncology trial data: 6x faster throughput, 6.4x fewer missed errors, 15.4x fewer false queries, and an estimated $5.1M in savings per Phase III trial. The numbers come from a hybrid architecture combining LLMs, clinical heuristics, and structured human review.

We are looking for a Software Engineer to join our small team and help us ship the features that our pharma customers need. You will report directly to the CTO and work across our platform building new capabilities, improving existing ones, and helping us keep the quality bar high as we grow.
This is a hands-on role focused on building. You will own well-scoped pieces of work end-to-end: from spec to implementation to tests to deploy. You will see your code go into production fast and running on real clinical trial data within days.

Building new features across our platform modules in Python and Type Script
Improving the reliability, performance, and test coverage of our existing codebase
Contributing to our data pipelines that ingest, normalize, and process clinical trial data
Helping integrate and evaluate LLM-powered components as part of our hybrid AI + heuristics approach

Sitting in on customer calls to see how data managers and medical reviewers actually use the platform, and using what you learn to write better software
Pairing with the CTO and founding engineer on architecture decisions, raising issues you see, and helping shape how we build

Python and Type Script, Postgres, AWS. Comfort with these is a plus, but strong engineers who have worked in adjacent stacks will pick them up fast.

We care more about what you can build than about checking boxes. That said, the following typically maps to success in this role.

Core

• 2-4 years shipping production software
• Solid backend fundamentals in Python (or a similar language you can translate from quickly)
• Comfort working across the stack, including writing frontend code in Type Script and React when needed
• Working knowledge of relational databases (Postgres or similar) and SQL
• Care about correctness, readability, and testing: you write code other people want to maintain
• Ability to take a scoped problem, break it down, and ship it without heavy hand-holding

Nice to have

• Experience with AWS or another major cloud provider
• Exposure to LLM-powered applications (even as a side project)
• Life sciences, clinical trials, or healthcare software experience
• Startup experience, or other environments where you've owned work end-to-end
• Background with data-heavy applications, ETL, or data validation systems

• Real problem, real customers. We have signed contracts with multiple pharma customers and are running live studies today. You will ship software that touches patient safety data in real trials, not a demo.
• Accelerated growth. Small team, short feedback loops, direct access to the CTO. You will grow into a senior engineer faster here than at most companies.
• Meaningful scope. Real ownership over the features you build, with room to push back and propose better approaches.
• Interesting domain. Clinical trial data is messy, high-stakes, and deeply interesting. You will learn things you cannot learn anywhere else.

• Base salary: $150,000 – $170,000, based on experience
• Equity: 0.15% – 0.35%, based on experience
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• Equipment budget and professional development support

NYC headquarters, hybrid. We are flexible on which days you’re in the office, but we expect you to be in person with the team regularly.
We are unable to sponsor visas at this time.