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Research Scientist, Medical World Models
Job Location:
Job Location:
Austin, TX - USA
Monthly Salary:
Not provided by the employer
Monthly Salary:
Posted:
29 September 2026 (Yesterday)
Posted:
Application Deadline:
27 December 2026
Application Deadline:
Vacancies:
1 Vacancy
Vacancies:
Job Summary
Our mission
Function Healths mission is to empower people to live longer healthier lives through proactive data-driven healthcare. We aggregate and analyze comprehensive health data including blood tests imaging and longitudinal biomarkers to provide members and clinicians with actionable clinically meaningful insights.
We believe individuals should understand their own health deeply in context and over time. Our platform brings together complex medical data and transforms it into clear trustworthy insights that support better health decisions.
Your mission
Function Health is building something that has not existed before: a multimodal longitudinal picture of health for hundreds of thousands (soon to be millions) of people. The Function proactive health dataset includes whole-body MRI 100 blood biomarkers radiology reports questionnaires and increasingly wearables data all linked to the same individual and refreshed over time. The Medical Intelligence Lab (MIL) at Function exists to turn that data into an early-warning system for every a nutshell we aim to design a new model of proactive predictive and preventative health.
The World Model teams job is at the core of that ambition. We are building models that can do two things: represent a members health today from whatever data exists historically and predict how that state evolves what the next lab panel is likely to show what the next scan is likely to find and eventually how that trajectory changes under an intervention.
As a Research Scientist on this team you will be a key technical contributor working directly with the Team Lead and MILs Chief Medical Scientist. You will design and train the models own the evidence that they work and ship them as the pretrained foundation upon which a portfolio of MIL products and tools build. The work is expected to reach large numbers of members and also the scientific literature; we publish and we deliver.
What youll do
Research and Design
- Longitudinal health dynamics. Design and train models that forecast a members next health state from irregularly sampled histories (repeat biomarker panels questionnaires and imaging-derived features etc) with calibrated uncertainty at clinically meaningful horizons.
- Multimodal health-state representation. Develop encoders capable of unifying medical data into a fused representation that is robust to arbitrary missing modalities and that transfers efficiently to downstream clinical tasks.
- Evaluation as a first-class deliverable. Build and maintain the evaluation framework that decides what we ship: powered validation sets confidence intervals label-efficiency curves forecasting metrics collapse diagnostics and benchmark registration against MILs clinically validated specialist models.
Development and Delivery
- Own the training and evaluation codebase end to end: data loaders over our standardized research exports distributed training on GPU infrastructure experiment tracking versioned model releases with model cards and licence inventories.
- Deliver pretrained encoders and forecasters to MILs product-track teams as documented reproducible artefacts and support their integration through clinical validation and hand-off to Engineering and Product Development.
- Work with the Data Team on dataset specifications and requirements.
Science Rigor and Responsible ML
- Differentiate between predictive and causal claims: we forecast from observational data and validate before we assert. Design analyses so that limitations are explicit and reviewable.
- Work within a PHI-sensitive regulated environment: de-identified data only licensable pretrained weights/data documentation that meets regulatory review.
- Write it down: experiment logs design notes and the periodic what we learned retrospectives that shape the roadmap. Publish at venues such as NeurIPS ICML ICLR CVPR ICCV/ECCV AAAI MICCAI etc in order to establish the lab.
Team
- Collaborate daily with ML engineers on adjacent MIL projects the MIL Data Infrastructure and Quality and Regulatory Affairs teams and clinicians on the Medical Integration Team.
- Help define how this team works: research reviews documentation standards code review and help hire the next members.
Who you are
You are a researcher who likes to ship and/or an engineer who insists on evidence. You have trained models on messy irregular real-world data and know that the evaluation design usually matters more than the architecture. You are comfortable being early; defining the problem the dataset request and the metric before the first training run and you communicate clearly with clinicians and regulators as well as with ML peers. You care that the model behaves well for the person on the other end of it.
Key requirements
- PhD in machine learning computer science biomedical engineering or a related field with 1-2 years of professional experience or MS/BS with 5 years building and evaluating ML models on real data.
- Demonstrated depth in at least one of: temporal / longitudinal modelling (sequence models neural ODE/CDE or state-space models forecasting with irregular sampling survival or progression modelling); self-supervised or foundation-model pretraining on medical imaging (3D MRI/CT) or multimodal data; multimodal fusion of imaging with tabular EHR or biomarker data.
- Strong Python and PyTorch; experience training at scale (multi-GPU large datasets experiment tracking) and writing code others build on.
- Rigorous evaluation instincts: statistical thinking calibration error analysis and the habit of asking whether a result would survive a larger validation set.
- Publication record at top ML or medical-imaging venues (e.g. MICCAI NeurIPS ICML ICLR CVPR) or equivalent evidence of research output delivered into production.
- Clear written and verbal communication with technical and clinical audiences.
Nice to have
- Experience with world models latent dynamics model-based RL or counterfactual / causal inference on observational health data.
- Work with longitudinal cohorts or biobank-scale data (e.g. UK Biobank NAKO ADNI) or with EHR/lab time series.
- Tabular foundation models or numeric tokenization for continuous clinical values; normative modelling; biological/organ-age estimation.
- Visionlanguage pretraining with radiology reports; report information extraction with LLMs.
- Cloud ML infrastructure (AWS Databricks); experience in healthcare or other regulated PHI-sensitive environments.
- Prior experience as a founding or early member of a research team.
Whats in it for you
You will help define the technical foundation of a new paradigm in healthcare. Your work will directly shape how millions of people understand and improve their health over decades and you will do it with data that no academic lab has working closely with other scientists engineers and clinicians.
Youll also have access to:
- Stock options
- Comprehensive health dental and vision plans for you and your family
- Wellness and commuter benefits
- Competitive vacation policy
- A culture that emphasizes learning collaboration and thoughtful engineering
- Remote work flexibility
Our commitment to diversity and inclusion
Were aiming to build a diverse team and inclusive company culture. We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate based on race ethnicity nationality religion sex gender gender identity gender expression sexual orientation age disability veteran status genetic information marital status or any legally protected status.
Important Notice: Legitimate communication from the Function Health team will always come from an email address ending in @. Function Health will never request personal information such as banking details or payment during the hiring process. Please be cautious of communications or job offers that come from other email domains instant messaging platforms or unsolicited calls. If you ever have doubts about the legitimacy of a communication please reach out to us directly at .
Required Experience:
IC
