Head of Clinician Science

Abridge Abridge · Vertical AI · San Francisco, CA · Builder

Abridge is seeking a Head of Clinician Science to lead a team responsible for ensuring the clinical validity and meaningfulness of their AI-powered healthcare platform. This role bridges clinical expertise with AI/ML development, focusing on defining quality standards, building scalable evaluation systems, and translating clinical workflows into product requirements. The ideal candidate has a strong clinical background, management experience, and technical fluency with AI/ML, particularly NLP and LLMs.

What you'd actually do

  1. Lead and grow the Clinician Science team. Recruit, develop, and manage a team of clinician scientists with diverse specialty expertise. Foster a culture of clinical rigor, intellectual curiosity, and cross-functional collaboration.
  2. Ensure clinical excellence across product development. Partner with product teams to embed clinical expertise into feature discovery, design, and validation. Translate clinical workflows and best practices into actionable product requirements.
  3. Define and uphold clinical quality standards. Establish frameworks for what "clinically meaningful" means across specialties, note types, and workflows. Guide the team in evaluating note quality, prompt iterations, and model outputs through LFD sessions and systematic assessments.
  4. Build scalable clinical evaluation systems. Partner with ML Science to develop LLM judges, annotation frameworks, and evaluation pipelines that scale clinical expertise. Ensure evaluation methodologies reflect real-world clinical judgment, not just technical metrics.
  5. Bridge clinical and technical domains. Serve as a translator between clinical reality and ML/engineering capabilities. Help engineers and ML scientists understand clinical nuance; help clinicians understand technical constraints and opportunities.

Skills

Required

  • Active clinical background (MD, DO, NP, PA, or equivalent clinical degree with 3+ years of clinical practice experience)
  • Management experience (3+ years managing technical or clinical teams)
  • Technical fluency with AI/ML (Strong understanding of NLP, LLMs, prompt engineering, and model evaluation)
  • Product sensibility
  • Systems thinking
  • Strong communication and influence
  • Pragmatic problem-solver

Nice to have

  • Board certification preferred
  • Experience with clinical informatics, health IT, or AI in healthcare
  • Completed a fellowship or advanced training in clinical informatics, health IT, or biomedical informatics
  • Research experience in NLP, clinical decision support, or AI for healthcare, with published work in peer-reviewed venues
  • Worked at a health tech company, EHR vendor, or AI healthcare startup in a product or applied research role
  • Expertise in a high-priority specialty
  • Experience designing clinical evaluation frameworks

What the JD emphasized

  • ensure AI outputs are clinically meaningful
  • clinical quality standards
  • scalable clinical evaluation systems
  • evaluation methodologies reflect real-world clinical judgment

Other signals

  • AI-powered platform
  • generative AI for healthcare
  • clinician scientists embedded across R&D product teams
  • ensure AI outputs are clinically meaningful
  • build scalable clinical evaluation systems
  • develop LLM judges, annotation frameworks, and evaluation pipelines