About Collate Collate is an AI document generation platform for life sciences. We automate paperwork with AI, helping our customers get life-saving innovations to patients years faster. Collate is an end-to-end solution, powering every step of drug, diagnostic, and medical device development—from concept to market.

Our CEO Surbhi Sarna is a former General Partner at Y Combinator. Surbhi founded nVision Medical, which developed a new method to detect ovarian cancer and was acquired by Boston Scientific. Our CTO Nate Smith is a former Visiting Partner at Y Combinator and founder of Lever. Our AI researchers, engineers, and designers have worked at Google, Nvidia, Meta, Netflix, Amazon, AirBnB, Hippocratic AI, and Grail, and 40% of our team are former founders.

We’re a small, elite team, with over $30M in seed funding from top investors (Redpoint, First Round Capital, Conviction, and Y Combinator) and leaders in healthcare and AI. This is a rare chance to join at the ground floor of a company with world-changing potential, experienced founders, and resources to execute at scale.

About The Role Collate’s Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with Fortune 100 life sciences organizations to deploy production AI systems across their most critical document and regulatory workflows. We operate at the boundary of customer deployment and core platform development — using early engagements to define repeatable solution patterns, evaluation standards, and agentic architectures that scale across the industry.

You’ll join as one of the first members of this team and operate with the autonomy of a founder. Your job is to go deep on the hardest problems at our most strategic customers — medical writers, regulatory affairs teams, clinical operations, and development engineers — identify what’s structurally broken, and build production AI systems that solve it. What you build shapes the Collate platform for every customer that comes after you.

Modern Tech Stack

Collate uses a modern tech stack, targeting a highly reliable and available platform. We use Go for scalable backend services, Postgres as our main database, TypeScript & React for frontend development, and Python for AI & ML services.

Our infrastructure is hosted on AWS with Kubernetes for orchestration and Terraform + Argo CD for configuration management. Other key systems include S3, Kafka, OpenSearch, LLMs, and other AI models.

What You’ll Do

• Lead end-to-end deployments of Collate’s AI systems inside life sciences organizations — owning scoping, build, and production rollout from first conversation to measurable workflow impact
• Go deep before you write a line of code. Embed with customer teams — medical writers, regulatory affairs, clinical ops — to understand what’s structurally broken, where the highest concentration of unsolved value lives, and what’s actually buildable
• Design and ship production AI systems — document generation agents, agentic workflows, data pipelines — that integrate with customers’ existing infrastructure and regulatory environments

What We’re Looking For

• You’ve owned customer-facing AI deployments end-to-end — from scoping through production adoption — and can point to shipped systems that drove measurable workflow impact
• You have a 0-to-1 build track record. You’ve built production software from scratch in ambiguous environments and moved fast enough to learn — not just prototype
• You have hands-on production AI experience: prompt engineering, agent development, evaluation frameworks, and deployment at scale — not just familiarity with the landscape

Why Join Collate? Impact: Build systems and experiences that touch real patients and providers, improving healthcare outcomes.

Ownership: Shape both our product experience and our engineering culture from the start.

Learning: Collaborate with a uniquely interdisciplinary team—AI researchers, healthcare leaders, and experienced startup builders.

Upside: Join a company early enough to have meaningful equity and career-defining impact.

The base salary range for this role is $150,000-$300,000 USD annually, depending on experience and level (Tier 1, San Francisco)

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.