Software Engineer, Data & ML Infrastructure

Software Engineer, Data & ML Infrastructure

Location: New York City (Remote to In-Person)

Full Time

Company: Surgeon Decision Intelligence

About Us

Surgeon Decision Intelligence (SDI) is an emerging leader in AI-driven medical imaging solutions for orthopedic care. Founded by a team of orthopedic spine surgeons and medical students from the Hospital for Special Surgery, the world’s best orthopedic hospital, our mission is to transform patient care by developing quantitative imaging biomarkers to inform treatment approaches for a broad spectrum of musculoskeletal disease and predict associated outcomes. We combine cutting-edge computer vision, medical image analysis, and machine learning to unlock new insights from MRI imaging, one of the most widely obtained modalities of medical imaging, accelerating the translation of novel imaging biomarkers from research into clinical practice.

Our team is passionate about bridging the gap between advanced computational methods and real-world healthcare impact. We work closely with clinical collaborators, surgeons, and research partners to ensure our models meet the highest standards for accuracy, interpretability, and reproducibility. 

Position Summary

We’re hiring a Software Engineer to help build and maintain the data and infrastructure backbone of our AI/ML platform. You’ll work directly with our Senior AI/ML Engineer on the systems that power everything we do: a PostgreSQL clinical and imaging database, cloud storage for medical imaging studies, internal APIs, and the tooling and CI/CD infrastructure that keeps our ML codebase reliable and reproducible.

This is a hands-on engineering role, not a research role. You’ll write production Python, own database migrations and data-quality tooling, help migrate legacy code into well-structured packages, and build the internal services that our ML and clinical teams depend on. It’s an excellent fit for an engineer who takes pride in clean, well-tested, well-documented software and wants meaningful exposure to medical imaging and applied ML in a regulated domain.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain our PostgreSQL database layer: schema changes, SQLAlchemy ORM models, Alembic migrations, and data-integrity constraints
• Build and maintain data ingestion, validation, and ETL pipelines for clinical outcomes data and medical imaging metadata (DICOM)
• Contribute to internal FastAPI services, including endpoints for imaging metadata, annotations, and access control
• Support our Azure cloud infrastructure: blob storage for imaging studies, containerized service deployments, and authentication/authorization workflows
• Help migrate legacy research code into versioned, dependency-managed Python packages following team engineering standards
• Write and maintain CI/CD pipelines, tests, and developer tooling that keep the codebase reliable and reproducible
• Build supporting tooling for ML workflows: dataset extraction and export, experiment/artifact tracking support, and data provenance
• Participate in code review and contribute to team engineering standards and documentation

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 3+ years of professional software development experience with Python
• Solid working knowledge of SQL and relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred), including schema design and query optimization
• Experience with software development lifecycle practices such as version control, testing, CI/CD, and collaborative development workflows.
• Experience with data and ML infrastructure (e.g., data pipelines, feature stores, model deployment, containerization, orchestration frameworks).
• Experience with cloud-based ML pipelines (Azure) and infrastructure-as-code tools.
• Proficiency with Git and collaborative development workflows (branching, pull requests, code review)
• Experience writing tested, documented, production-quality code with type hints and modern Python packaging practices
• Strong communication skills and comfort working in a small, fast-moving team

Preferred Skills and Qualifications

• Experience with an ORM and database migration tooling (e.g., SQLAlchemy and Alembic)
• Experience building REST APIs with FastAPI or a similar Python web framework
• Experience with Azure (blob storage, container apps, Entra ID) or another major cloud platform
• Familiarity with Docker and CI/CD systems (e.g., GitHub Actions)
• Experience with healthcare data: DICOM, medical imaging pipelines, clinical registries, or EHR-derived datasets
• Understanding of HIPAA and handling PHI in production systems
• Familiarity with ML engineering tooling (e.g., MLflow, model/data versioning) and supporting ML teams, even without direct modeling experience
• Experience with modern Python dependency management (e.g., uv, Poetry) and publishing internal packages
• Experience working in or migrating legacy codebases toward better structure and standards
• Experience with software quality practices for regulated medical software, including requirements traceability, validation, configuration management, and controlled releases
• Experience with orchestration or workflow systems for data/ML pipelines, specifically Databricks.

Why Join Us?

At SDI, you’ll be part of a mission-driven team working at the frontier of medical AI. You will have the opportunity to:

• Contribute to technology that could redefine clinical management of musculoskeletal health and diseases. 
• Work with a diverse and inclusive multidisciplinary team of engineers and clinicians.
• Grow your skills in a dynamic, fast-moving startup environment.

Location

Remote (U.S.) temporarily, but able to transition to in-person work in New York City in about 6 months.

Compensation

Highly competitive salary + equity + benefits, commensurate with experience. If you’re excited about our mission, we want to hear from you.

The base salary for this role is $140,000 - 175,000.

Surgeon Decision Intelligence provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.