Staff Software Engineer, Privacy

About Us:

Ambience Healthcare is the leading AI platform for documentation, coding, and clinical workflow, built to reduce administrative burden and protect revenue integrity at the point of care. Trusted by top health systems across North America, Ambience’s platform is live across outpatient, emergency, and inpatient settings, supporting more than 100 specialties with real-time, coding-aware documentation. The platform integrates directly with Epic, Oracle Cerner, athenahealth, and other major EHRs. Founded in 2020 by Mike Ng and Nikhil Buduma, Ambience is headquartered in San Francisco and backed by Oak HC/FT, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), OpenAI Startup Fund, Kleiner Perkins, and other leading investors.

Join us in the endeavor of accelerating the path to safe & useful clinical super intelligence by becoming part of our community of problem solvers, technologists, clinicians, and innovators.

The Role:

Ambience handles PHI for millions of patient encounters across the nation's leading health systems. That trust is earned through technical controls that actually work, not policies that live in a PDF.

You'll own the systems that protect patient data: access control, audit logging, data retention, and the compliance infrastructure that lets us operate inside the most security-conscious health systems in the country. You'll design systems that enforce least-privilege access, build audit infrastructure that can withstand compliance scrutiny, and create data lifecycle pipelines that honor retention obligations automatically.

Privacy engineering here isn't a checkbox exercise. It's what lets us sell and expand into demanding enterprise health systems.

Our engineering roles are hybrid in our SF office (3x/week).

What You’ll Own:

• Access Control & Authorization — Design and implement granular RBAC across our application. Enforce least-privilege policies, and build workflows requiring users to document why they're accessing specific PHI.

• Audit Logging & Compliance — Ensure comprehensive audit logs across all application touch points where PHI is accessed. Integrate with SIEM so logs are queryable and useful for real compliance investigations, not just checkbox compliance.

• Data Retention & De-identification — Build infrastructure supporting per-org retention configurations across all PHI artifact types: EHR chart data, transcripts, audio recordings, logs. Scale intelligent de-identification pipelines across multi-modal clinical data while preserving utility for downstream use cases.

Who You Are:

• 7+ years in software engineering, 2+ focused on security, privacy, or compliance infrastructure

• Staff-level scope: owned cross-cutting initiatives, influenced technical direction across teams

• Strong backend fundamentals in Python, Go, TypeScript, or similar

• Built access control systems, audit infrastructure, or data lifecycle pipelines

• In SF, 3x/week in-person

Why Here:

At most companies, privacy engineering is a side quest. Here, it directly enables sales and expansion into the most demanding health systems in the country. You'll own our privacy infrastructure end-to-end and set the standard for what best-in-class looks like. Small team, high trust, direct access to leadership. Staff engineers here shape technical direction, not just execute on it.

Pay Transparency

We offer a base compensation range of approximately $250,000–$300,000 per year, exclusive of equity. This intentionally broad range provides flexibility for candidates to tailor their cash and equity mix based on individual preferences. Our compensation philosophy prioritizes meaningful equity grants, enabling team members to share directly in the impact they help create.

Outside of this range? We still encourage you to apply. We take an individualized approach to compensation that accounts for experience, scope, and the life factors that matter to each candidate.

Being at Ambience:

• An opportunity to work with cutting edge AI technology, on a product that dramatically improves the quality of life for healthcare providers and the quality of care they can provide to their patients

• Work alongside a world-class, diverse team that is deeply mission aligned

• Ownership over your success and the ability to significantly impact the growth of our company

• Competitive salary and equity compensation with benefits including health, dental, and vision coverage, quarterly retreats, unlimited PTO, and a 401(k) plan with matching

Ambience is committed to supporting every candidate’s ability to fully participate in our hiring process. If you need any accommodations during your application or interviews, please reach out to our Recruiting team at [email protected] . We’ll handle your request confidentially and work with you to ensure an accessible and equitable experience for all candidates.