Sonia (YC W24) .
Get AI-powered advice on this job and more exclusive features. This range is provided by Sonia (YC W24). Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more.
Base pay range
$120,000.00/yr - $180,000.00/yr
About Sonia
Our sole focus is to build a safe AI therapist clinically as effective as the 99th percentile human therapist and to make mental health support accessible to anyone. After 12 months of exploring all sorts of architectures, form factors, and approaches, we have recently had a major breakthrough. As of a few weeks ago, we now have a version with which we are starting to see very significant clinical outcomes in the form of GAD-7 (anxiety score) reductions even just after 2 weeks of using Sonia. We are receiving messages daily of how it’s changing people’s lives. We’re just at the start and there is still so much to do and build. Now it’s time to move fast and scale the team.
We are currently a 5 person team based in San Francisco and have raised $3.5m from top investors including Y Combinator, Moonfire, and the founders of Verkada, Reddit, and Instacart. We have a broad clinical advisory board, including Oren Frank, the founder of Talkspace.
The Role
To explain what you will do, it might help to first give a bit of background. Sonia is a Voice-based AI Therapist that lives inside a mobile app. Our system is fully built on top of OpenAI (wrapper). You will help build a responsive, safe, and effective AI therapist at scale. You will work on complex realtime workflows where >50 prompts run in parallel and interact with each other within a conversation. The role involves designing, evaluating, and improving the end-to-end AI therapy experience.
Responsibilities
Analyze data, read anonymized transcripts, and talk to clinicians to understand where Sonia needs to improve semantically
Investigate why AI behavior occurs and identify fixes (context, memory components, prompts, or architecture changes)
Build datasets of LLM traces to test changes using internal eval tooling
Modify prompts or develop new components to improve system performance
Iterate at least 10+ times, balancing analytical rigor with practical intuition
Test thoroughly to ensure no negative side effects before deploying
Monitor production and repeat the improvement process
Contribute to other LLM-based features (personalized meditations, reflection questions, session reviews) and internal tooling
Note: at a startup of this size, weekly responsibilities may vary and additional tasks may arise.
What We Are Looking For
Background in computer science and strong engineering skills (especially Python)
Experience building AI products end to end and delivering usable code
Highly creative and strong systems thinker
Exceptional writing skills
Previous experience in psychology is strongly preferred; otherwise, a genuine interest to learn quickly and engage with clinical psychology material
Culture
We care about kindness, hard work, and intelligence. We seek people genuinely interested in making the world happier and who are ready to work hard to help others. The team tends to work in person in San Francisco, with intense but rewarding days and a collaborative environment.
Seniorities and Employment
Seniority level:
Entry level
Employment type:
Full-time
Job function:
Engineering and Information Technology
Industries:
Software Development
Job search notes
Referrals increase your chances of interviewing at Sonia (YC W24). Get notified about new Artificial Intelligence Engineer jobs in San Francisco, CA.
San Francisco, CA various salary listings and timelines are shown for context.